Everyone was expecting it, but still – wasn’t it supposed to happen a little later in history? Thursday ends the reign of the Paper King, supplanted by its young descendent, Prince eBook.
Amazon, the big book retailer (they sell small ones, too), announced on Thursday that sales of electronic books, those digital computer files that are read on the screens of such devices as the Kindle and the Nook, officially surpassed the sales of regular paper editions.
In the future, when the generations of little e-readers look back on the occasion, they’ll note that the actual date was April 1, 2011, when Amazon.com sales of e-books began to outpace physical editions at the rate of 105 to 100 copies sold. Some Kindle books are provided without charge, but Amazon says those figures are not included in the statistics, otherwise the ratio would be even higher.
“Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly.”
Amazon has been selling the old-fashioned books for fifteen years, and the electronic kind for just over three.
I’ve yet to even hold one in my hands.
That’s probably a good thing.