Amazon.com touts more e-book sales than paperbacks

28.01.2011
Amazon.com said it is selling more Kindle e-books than paperback books.

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos said in a fourth-quarter earnings statement Thursday that the e-book-selling milestone "has come even sooner than we expected."

The company said that in all of 2010, it sold 15% more Kindle e-books than paperbacks. In July, Amazon.com reported it had sold more Kindle e-books than hardcover books. For all of 2010, it sold three times as many Kindle e-books as hardcovers. Free Kindle books are excluded from those figures.

Bezos also revealed that Amazon sold "millions" of third-generation , which have the paper-like e-ink Pearl display, making it the best-selling product in Amazon's history.

The third-generation Kindle with a 6-in. screen and Wi-Fi capability sells for $139.

The Kindle accounts for about half of all e-reader sales, according to analysts at Forrester Research and Yankee Group. Gartner of 11 million e-reader devices globally in 2011, up from 6.6 million in 2010.