Kindle ebook downloads now outnumber printed book sales in the UK

The day has come. The masses who have switched from paper to an E Ink display are starting to influence Amazon’s sales so significantly that the retail giant now sells more Kindle ebooks than ‘real’ printed books in the United Kingdom.

According to The Guardian, the company has confirmed that it now sells more ebooks than paperback and hardcover books combined, just two years after launching in the UK. They hit the same landmark in the United States four years after the Kindle was introduced in the country.

Amazon said that from the start of this year, for every 100 hardback and paperback book sold, its customers downloaded 114 ebooks. The figures don’t include free ebooks (which would presumably push those download figures up even more) or printed books which don’t have a Kindle edition.

Admittedly, the stats are unaudited — the company doesn’t release audited sales figures for its ebooks, only for printed sales.

According to Amazon, its UK customers are also buying more books than they did before they owned a Kindle — about four times as many. And it seems many of them are buying into the Fifty Shades of Grey craze; Amazon has sold over 2-million digital copies of EL James’s novel in the last four months.

Image: thekellyscope