I remember when to hold a hardback copy of a book or for an author to have their original writings contained in a hardback was an incredible honour. But oh how the world has changed. Here is what has been happening at Amazon the past few months.

‘Amazon.com has reached a milestone, selling more e-books than hardbacks over the past three months.

But publishers said it was still too early to gauge for the entire industry whether the growth of e-books was cannibalizing sales of paperback books, a huge and crucial market.

Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos also countered the perception that sales of the company’s Kindle e-reading device had suffered due to the competition from other devices, such as Apple’s iPad.

He said the growth rate of Kindle device sales had ‘reached a tipping point’, having tripled since the company lowered its price to $US189 from $US259 last month, following a similar move by competitor Barnes & Noble to cut the price on its Nook e-reader…

Amazon painted a picture of accelerating growth in sales of e-books, which can be read on the Kindle and through software on a host of other devices, including Apple’s iPad and iPhone. The figures don’t include free e-books.

Over the past month, Amazon sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books it sold, it said…

Another statistic shared by Amazon suggest it remains the leading retailer for e-books. The company said that of the 1.14 million James Patterson e-books sold as of July 6, nearly 868,000 were from Amazon. In June, Apple CEO Steve Jobs had claimed that his company’s iBookstore had taken 20 per cent of the market.’

Source: Geoffrey A. Fowler & Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg for The Australian