The book is dead, long live the book
While much of the hype around the mobile revolution has centred on smartphones and tablets, publishing continues to transform itself.
In announcing its quarterly earnings, e-tail giant Amazon revealed it sold more Kindle books - the format Amazon uses for electronic books - than traditional paperbacks in the last quarter.
"Thanks to our customers, we achieved two big milestones," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. "We had our first $10 billion quarter, and after selling millions of third-generation Kindles with the new Pearl e-ink display during the quarter, Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com.
"Last July we announced that Kindle books had passed hardcovers and predicted that Kindle would surpass paperbacks in the second quarter of this year, so this milestone has come even sooner than we expected - and it's on top of continued growth in paperback sales."
That quarterly revenue total was actually $12.95 billion, which was a 36 percent increase on the same quarter a year ago. This was more or less in line with analyst expectations, as was the forecast of between $9.1 billion and $9.9 billion for the next quarter. But investors seemed to have priced better figures into Amazon's share price, which was down around eight percent at time of writing.
The Kindle news is intriguing. Amazon didn't reveal precisely how many Kindles it has sold, but did say it had sold millions of the third generation devices, and that it's now the best-selling product in Amazon history.
What would be really interesting would be to know how extensively used the Kindle apps for mobile devices are. Surely it's no coincidence that Kindle book sales overtook paperbacks in the quarter when tablets really acquired momentum.
