Amazon.com announced recently that it is selling more Kindle e-books than printed hardcover or paperback books. The company also said that since April 1, it has been selling 105 Kindle e-books for every 100 print books-free Kindle books are excluded from that count, and would skew the statistics even more dramatically, in e-books’ favor.Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the e-book threshold arrived sooner than expected.
Amazon has sold printed books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four. While Amazon doesn't share sales numbers, the company admits it has sold more than three times as many Kindles books thus far in 2011 than it did in the same period in 2010.
The e-book surge is one of the biggest indicators of the impact of technology on culture, and the nation's public librarians have been careful observers of the trend for years. Many public libraries already offer e-book borrowing for free, subject to a library user loading special software on a desktop computer, mobile device or some e-book readers.
