Amazon: E-book Sales Soared, Print Crawled
From Publishers Weekly:
In a statement accompanying its fourth quarter and full year results for 2012, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos neatly summed up where he sees the future of book retailing heading–especially for his company. “We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting,” said Bezos. “After 5 years, eBooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast – up approximately 70% last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5%.”
To fuel the sale of e-books, Amazon has sold lots of digital readers and tablets, but has is its custom released no hard numbers other than repeating that at year-end, Kindle Fire HD, Kindle Fire, Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle held the top four spots on the Amazon worldwide best seller charts since launch. The number of digital products Amazon offered at the end of 2012 stood at 23 million, up from 19 million a year ago.
. . . .
Sales of some higher priced items were softer than last year, Tom Szkutak, Amazon CFO, said, as were sales of some consumer electronic products. Amazon’s devices did well, however, and Szkutak said Amazon ran out of stock of the Paperwhite.
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
Seventy percent growth in e-books!
I’m sure there are people who will argue that this means e-book sales are leveling off….
Well, that didn’t take long! 01/2013/why-apple-is-the-stumbling-block-in-amazons-ebook-transition/
The chains holding up the sky are also looking very unstable.
All of the statistics that people quote about the slowdown of e-books lacks Amazon’s data.
Well, here is Amazon’s data.
Perhaps that means some folks need to rethink their conclusions.