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Writers and Editors (RSS feed)

E-book sales taking off

Volume of Kindle book sales stuns Amazon's Jeff Bezos (USA Today's tech columnist Edward C. Baig interviews Bezos). The comments are as interesting as the article. An avid book reader, for examples, says, ". I have no way to "share" the book with my circle of friends when i'm done. That's a very costly detraction.
It's not the cost of the device that is the problem.. it's the cost of the books. Until they resolve that.. the Kindle (or iPad as an e-Reader) is going to slow down at some point. Or, worse... there will soon be book hack sites where people download books for illegally.. and this shorts the author and the publishers." Echoing another reader, who writes, "For a printed book, you can give it to your friend, or resell it on Amazon, or donate it to a library. For the Kindle version, you can't do any of the above. The price of these electronic books should be reduced 80% to compensate for loss of these resell rights."

An MBA student wants to be able to mark up his Harvard MBA cases in PDF format (as he does now in nitro PDF) and bring them out into the sun to read. He's waiting for Kindle or someone to do that.

Some of the discussion is about why Kindle is black and white but not color. Some readers like Kindle's format; others question Amazon's argument for keeping the Kindle b&w--and for sticking with its proprietary format and not supporting the standard ePub format (open formatting, so books can be read on any reader). A fascinating changing market.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that the late Stieg Larsson becomes first author to sell a million ebooks on Amazon (Alison Flood, 7-28-10).
Kindle is selling more e-books than hardcover books. It doesn't report how e-book sales compare with paperback sales.

Other stories about e-book sales:
Amazon's E-book Sales Up 80%: Hardcovers Not Dead Yet (PC World 7-20-10)
Amazon's E-book Sales Tripled in First Half of 2010 (Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly, 7-19-10)
The eBook Sales Dip, an audiofile of a digitalbookworld Roundtable (6-17-10)

There's a round-up of links to stories on e-book markets, rights, and audiences under
Publishing and e-publishing on Writers and Editors
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