35% Amazon Books Sold are Kindle!
That is, on Amazon, 35% of books that have a Kindle equivalent are sold as Kindle ebooks.That’s amazing!Jeff Bezos attributes this to the fact that Kindle readers read a very disproportionate number of books compared to the general population. It reminds me of the 80-20 rule which states that 20 percent of something always are responsible for 80 percent of the results. Since you’re reading this, chances are that you are a member of the 20% of book readers.Obvious I suppose, but it’s interesting to codify it in this New York Times article (written on 5/6/09): http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/how-the-kindle-let-amazon-make-a-lot-from-the-few/From the article:"…Look at this rather astounding statistic from Amazon’s news conference on Wednesday introducing a larger Kindle: On Amazon.com, 35 percent of sales of books that have a Kindle edition are sold in that format. That’s up, by the way, from 13 percent in February, according to a slide put up by Amazon.com’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos. Think of what that means. Amazon has tens of millions of customers. It sold 500,000 Kindles last year, Mark Mahaney of Citigroup estimates. So even if it has twice that many in distribution, that is a lot of e-book buying by a small number of people. The Kindle must have an enormous penetration of what is a very distinctive, and for Amazon, quite lucrative, segment: very heavy buyers of books."So I guess you shouldn’t be surprised that the 9.99 boycott or other initiatives have an effect. If you’re in business, you want to keep your 20% happy.———————————————–Sam LandstromAuthor of acclaimed "MetaGame", sci-fi novel for 80 centshttp://www.amazon.com/MetaGame-ebook/dp/B002AJ88LC
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