LONDON (ShareCast) - With sales of online digital books - or eBooks - soaring and eclipsing the demand for printed copies, many are hailing this as the beginning of the end for the hardback. Amazon.co.uk is now selling twice as many 'Kindle' (it's eBook reader) books as hardcover titles, "even as hardcover sales continue to grow." The online book, music and film retailer revealed that since the start of April, it sold 242 Kindle eBooks for every 100 hardbacks sold. This even includes sales of hardbacks where no Kindle version is available, the group said. If the firm was to include the number of free eBooks given in the figures, the number would be even higher. "This is truly astonishing when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books from Amazon.co.uk for over 13 years and Kindle books for only nine months," said Kindle European director Gordon Willoughby. Amazon provides Kindle customers with the choice of over 650,000 eBooks available for purchase from the UK store. A further one million are available free of charge. In the US, for every 100 printed books Amazon.com (NasdaqGS: AMZN - news) sold since 1 April, 105 Kindle books were sold, the first time that eBook sales beat hardcovers. "We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly," said founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos. Meanwhile, Waterstone's - the popular book chain operating through 314 UK stores - said that hardcovers are being outsold by digital books by one to four. The group began selling the Sony Reader in shops back in September 2008, and is reported to be ramping up the sales of e-readers with the inclusion of devices from consumer electronics companies, iriver and Elonex. --- BC
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