Electric dreams
E-tail giant Amazon has invested heavily in the Kindle e-reader in anticipation of the majority of books eventually being purchased and read in electronic, rather than print form. So it rarely misses an opportunity to celebrate another e-book milestone.
The big one was announced yesterday - Amazon now sells more electronic books than real ones.
"Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books," said CEO Jeff Bezos. "We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly - we've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years."
"In addition, we're excited by the response to Kindle with Special Offers for only $114, which has quickly become the bestselling member of the Kindle family. We continue to receive positive comments from customers on the low $114 price and the money-saving special offers."
The latter revelation comes as a bit of a surprise, given that the new Kindle is only $25 cheaper, and for that you have to put up with advertising. Of course Amazon calls it ‘special offers', and that looks like a good piece of marketing because people are buying it, literally.
