Inside the Reported Kindle Sales Explosion
Kindle is dominating the book retail industry, according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who says that; “Kindle sales are now 35 percent of books where we have Kindle editions.” Many were skeptical of these results, but upon further investigation, the possibility exists that the release of the Kindle DX has sparked an increase in Kindle book sales.
Three publishing houses checked their book sales and noticed that Kindle sales indeed have risen approximately 30% since the release of the Kindle DX. One house found that Kindle editions comprised 32 percent of sales; another found that out of their 50 top bestsellers, Kindle comprised 30 percent. The third publishing house found that Kindle comprised 50 percent of sales on a new release, but would not attribute these percentages across the board because numbers were only applicable for this new release, not all new releases. In any case, Kindle sales have shot up.
So what kinds of Kindle books are being sold? Fiction is the dominant genre, 80 percent of the top Kindle titles being fiction as well as 75 of the top 100 titles. Classics also are an unlikely but dominant genre on Kindle, comprising 35 percent of all fiction and 14 percent of all Kindle books.
This huge increase in sales could mean bad things for publishing houses. Two options exist: Kindle books can add to revenue sales, or they can take away from print revenue sales. Kindle books are sold at a much less expensive rate, such as Pride and Prejudice, which is sold for $13 in print but for only $3 on Kindle. These may result in a loss of revenue on print sales, but an increase in Kindle sales.
There exists also another possibility in how Kindle sales made such an impressive leap in such a short time. With the release of the Kindle DX, many question whether the sales are attributed to those buying the Kindle device, or to subscribers and Kindle users purchasing books from the e-bookstore. Evidence suggests that Kindle sales have increased because of the 600,000 Kindles sold through the end of 2008 and also the 325,000 Kindle DX’s sold in the first quarter of this year, but there is no conclusive result.
Again, Morgan James is preparing our titles to be available on the various Kindle versions via our partner Ingram Digital, so we’ll have specific data for our primarily non-fiction titles soon.
