Kindle Sales Sparkle For Amazon

Amazon said this week that it is also now selling more e-books for the Amazon Kindle than it is hardcover books, a turnabout fueled by Kindle sales accelerating each month in the second quarter of 2010, both on a sequential month-over-month basis and a year-over-year basis.

Amazon said the Kindle's second quarter sales explosion is likely due to the price drop last month in which Amazon lowered the price of the Kindle to $189 in June, a $70 reduction and a response to Barnes & Noble cutting the price of its Nook e-reader to $199.

"We've reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle - the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, in a statement. "In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books--astonishing when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months."

Amazon said the Kindle currently boasts more than 630,000 books in the U.S. Kindle Store, including 106 of 110 New York Times Best Sellers, and more than 510,000 books are $9.99 or less. Additionally, more than 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available.

According to Amazon, over the past three months for every 100 hardcover books the company has sold, it has sold 143 kindle books. And over the past month, 180 Amazon Kindle books have been sold per 100 hardcover books. In the first half of 2010, Amazon sold three times as many Kindle books as it sold in the first half of 2009.

Meanwhile, the Association of American Publishers reported that e-book sales jumped 163 percent in May and 207 percent year-to-date through May. Amazon said its Kindle book sales in May and its year-to-date sales through May exceeded those growth rates.

Amazon's dramatic success with the Kindle comes as competitors like Sony and Barnes & Noble attempt to capitalize on the e-reader market with Kindle rivals. Another major Kindle rival, the Apple iPad, hit the market in April. The iPad integrates an e-reader and an Apple e-book store, the iBookstore, into a portable Internet device. Industry watchers predicted the Amazon Kindle would perish at the hands of the Apple iPad, but instead the Kindle has continued to forge its path as the e-reader to beat. While Amazon has not said exactly how many Kindle's it has sold, Apple last month hit the 3 million mark in Apple iPad sales.