Amazon's emphasis on hardcover sales is a pretty transparent slant. I agree with you about the pointlessness, waste even, of hardcover books but it would be really interesting to get some figures about paperback and ebook sales though. Paper book sales would almost certainly outstrip ebook sales but I think that trend will shift too.

I am more concerned about book selection here in SA. The region based availability doesn't make sense to me in this global age and I would like to see the same ebooks available everywhere. I think the next issue is going to be formats. Why doesn't the Kindle support epub? ePub looks like it is going to become a pretty important format which Apple and Google have adopted. That is a lot of momentum there and Amazon needs to take one for the team and at least support the format.

It's not a fait accompli that eBooks will cost less than printed books. Personally I think that is outrageous but not everybody will agree.

As for the Amazon release – I found it disingenuous. As a number of commentators have pointed out hard covers are hardly considered a viable print option and many books will never see a hardcover edition. It's for this reason that Jacinda Woodhead notes in her analysis of the issue that “ebooks vs hardcovers is a peculiar comparison.”

TheBigMoney.com notes that “judging by the way the story has ricocheted around the media world, Amazon has played its cards very well. But because it's being so coy, we have to assume that the numbers are not as good as they might be when reported simply as, well, numbers.”

Your “regular” pricing versus sale pricing distinction doesn't really make much difference. I used the same book for pricing comparisons and the same principle applies to other books. Dan Brown's Lost Symbol, for example, is a recent book. The Amazon pricing is $10.12 and $9.99 (about R73.32 and R72.38 respectively) for the Kindle and mass paperback versions, respectively. The paperback costs about R118.11 on kalahari.net and R100 at Exclusive Books through the exclus1ves site.

Your post was a little misleading because you implied that paperbacks would be cheaper for SA readers who were reading the post. You should have clarified that paperbacks would be a cheaper option if ordered in the US or where Amazon's additional shipping charges wouldn't apply. For South Africans, the Kindle pricing is where the bargain is.

As for the Amazon press release, it clearly states that Kindle books are outselling hardcover books, not all books. They are very specific about that.

The point I made was not that eBooks isn't growing but that they are still very far from surpassing print book sales. If you glanced at the Amazon press release in question it is certainly the impression they seem to want to create.

I'm still unclear why my conclusions would be labeled misleading.

Two arbitary points I'd like to make:
Ebooks and printed books are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I remember, a long while back, when some management from Exclusive Books broke away to start a new bookshop chain, Facts and Fiction. At first, Exclusive Books thought that they would take a chunk of their market share, but in fact, sales *increased*. It would seem that more options created a bigger market. (This is certainly true for me: I buy ebooks that I would never buy in hard print, and vice versa)

And, as a complete aside: On my last visit to Austin, I visited a major mall, for the sole purpose of visiting their bookshop and buying a stack of them. But guess what? No bookshop at the mall! And now I hear that Barnes and Nobles is up for sale due to decreasing turnover. Very, very worrying. Online bookshops are grabbing the market, and they are the ones controlling the ebook distribution. I think we are going to see a huge change of stats in the next five years or so.

On Amazon the paperback is $8.24 but you need to add shipping costs of about $14 for standard shipping (includes per item and shipment cost) so that “cheap” paperback will cost about $22.24 or about R164.23 and it will take a few weeks to arrive from the USA. When it comes to the Kindle version of the same book, you pay $11.99 (about R88.54) and you will have the book on your device in a few minutes (probably less time than it takes to find your keys to drive to the shops to buy the book in paperback). Kindle books do vary in price but I hazard a guess that the price works out relatively cheap when compared to physical versions.

The big problem with ebooks is availability. Despite all the books available on the Kindle for SA customers, we don't have the full catalogue of books available to us. I have yet to discover a real rationale for this aside for increasingly arbitrary geographical restrictions and the need to protect traditional distribution channels and retail outlets. Ebooks are pretty flexible. I can read an Amazon ebook on my Kindle, my Android phone and my MacBook. Each device will sync to the last point I read up to so I can just pick up where I left off. I can store thousands of books on a single device. Those two factors alone change my approach to reading.

What I really want, as a customer, is to be able to buy a digital version of any book available in print, ideally. I am happy to pay a reasonable price for it but why should I have to buy a paper version? One book which comes to mind is Anathem which is a pretty hefty book which runs to several hundred pages. It doesn't seem to be available on the Kindle and the Audible version is restricted to us here in SA. The book is available here off the shelf, why can't I buy the digital version?

The next big issue which we will have to contend with is ebook formats. Apple and other ebook retailers are pushing the epub standard which the Kindle doesn't support. This sort of fragmentation of the market can't be good for customers.

One thing you really can't ignore is the growth of the ebook market. While the $/R values show huge disparities, the trend is very real and not to be dismissed. Also don't forget that paper books are entrenched as a medium whereas ebooks are relatively new. Ebooks have quite a hill to climb just to address paper books entrenched status in our society but I suspect they will become the primary way many people will read going forward.

Paper books' growth is static to marginal increase, ebooks DOUBLING every year? So in 5 years (assuming this doubling does not accelerate, which is unlikely) the ebook market will be roughly as big as traditional.

That's not bad.