The Rise of E-Books

E-book Milestones Rocks Book Publishing
Book publishing history was made when, for the first time, the sale of e-books — books in electronic form — outpaced hardcover print book sales on the Amazon.com site. Happening in the second quarter of 2010, just after the late March release of Apple iPad and April launch of its iBookstore, the e-book sales figures were another critical signpost that the e-book revolution was picking up pace.

The iPad Launch Helps Change the E-Book Business
The e-reader and e-book market had already been seeing rapid growth over 2009; in addition to Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, Sony, also a player in the e-reader marketplace, had reported that second quarter 2010 e-reader sales had tripled over the prior year.

Two booksellers — the online book sales pioneer and retail giant Amazon.com and venerated bricks-and-mortar stalwart Barnes & Noble — had dominated the e-reader market with their respective Kindle and Nook e-reading devices. Then, in late March/early April 2010, Apple's releases of the iPad and the iBookstore, respectively brought new, formidable entries into both the e-reader the e-book retail competitions. Apple CEO Steve Jobs threw down a virtual gauntlet when he announced that, after a mere eight weeks in the business, the company had captured 22% of the electronic book market, shaking to the core the two largest book and e-book retailers.

An E-Book First
On Monday, August 23, 2010 Amazon added a milestone to the history of the e-book when the retailer released a statement announcing that, for the first time, the sales of Kindle e-books outpaced sales of hardcover books on its site in the second quarter of its fiscal year. For the period of April through June 2010, Amazon sold an average of 143 e-books for every 100 hardbacks; the figures for June were 180 e-books to 100 hardcovers. Free e-books downloads (that is, downloads of books commonly available in the public domain, such as the classics Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen) were not included in the numbers.

The competitive response to Apple was apparent in Amazon's press release of their e-book record. With carefully worded language that avoided divulging too much about its numbers, the Seattle-based retailer outlined achievements such as: the millions of people already reading on Amazon Kindles; the company's selling 867,881 of bestselling author James Patterson's 114 million e-books; that Kindle books generally outpacing the industry e-book sales growth.

E-Book Growth Helped by Price War
Interestingly, Kindle books' June 2010 sales growth was spurred in part by Amazon's response to a competitive threat by Barnes and Noble. Earlier that month, B&N had dropped the price of their Nook e-reader from $259 to $199, causing Amazon to immediately reduce the price tag on their "#1 bestselling... most wished-for, most gifted" product, the Kindle e-reader. At $189, the Kindle undercut Barnes and Noble's Nook and gave consumers a very significant 27% reduction in price for the device. While Amazon didn't release figures on the Kindle, they did report that e-reader device sales were accelerating each month and Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder and CEO, himself stated the price drop to be a "tipping point"--so one can safely assume the e-retailer experienced a good bump in their e-reader sales numbers and that the increased e-book sales reflected the multiplied numbers of e-readers on the market.

Given the number of new Kindles in consumer hands, it was not surprising that Amazon would see a whopping rise in their June e-book-to-hardcover sales ratio as new owners loaded up their devices with e-book titles.

Reader's Usual Book-Buying Habits and the E-Book History Milestone
The e-readers and e-books sales spike in Spring/early Summer 2010 was due to both the momentum of already-in-place technology and some extraordinary Apple developments that were happening in the rapidly-accelerating electronic publishing landscape. But the upward trending sales were also helped along by one very ordinary and typical book-publishing seasonal factor - early summer is largely when avid book lovers begin purchasing those indispensable summer staples: their beach reads.

The E-Book Buying Trend Continues
Since that point in bookselling history, the sales of e-books continued to trend upward, causing a revolution that the book publishing industry hadn't seen since the inventor of moveable type, Johann Gutenberg, printed his first Bible. By January 2011 Kindle e-books overtook paperback books to become the most popular format on Amazon.com and by May of 2011, the company announced that e-book sales were outpacing hardcover and paperback books, combined.

The rapid rise of the e-book format had a huge impact on the book publishing industry, and clearly contributed to the demise of the major bricks-and-mortar bookseller, Borders, which was very late to both the e-retailing and electronic book markets.

Read more about e-book history here.