Ebooks overtake paperbacks: is this the death of the printed book?

From the Telegraph in the UK:

There is a certain inevitability in the news that eBook sales have now overtaken paperback sales on Amazon’s US site. Amazon’s Kindle 2 is so light and so cheap that it’s easy to see why people have rushed to buy it and is a vast improvement on its predecessor.

The eBook trend is nowhere near peaking. Over the next five years we can expect to see more and more readers move away from printed books and pick up eBooks instead.

There are however some who prefer printed books. They like having shelves filled with books they’ve read and books they plan to read; they like the feel of the book in their hands and the different weights and typefaces and layouts of different titles.

There’s no reason to think that lovers of printed books will change their minds. But there will undoubtedly be fewer of them as time goes by because more people will grow up with eBooks and spend little time with printed ones.

Read the full article here

And in another article Amazon has revealed that it has sold more Kindle eBooks than paperbacks in the US during the final three months of 2010. A similar pattern has continued during January 2011 with 115 eBooks being sold for every 100 paperbacks.

The figure only relates to the US market and the number of eBooks sold on Amazon’s own e-reader device, the Kindle, which now accounts for 41.5 per cent of the e-reader market.

Read this article here