For every 100 hardback books sold by Amazon.com over the past three months 143 Kindle eBooks have been sold, according to new figures released by the company.
The online retailer, which recently lowered the cost of its Kindle reader, says for the past month the figure increases to 180 digital books for every 100 hardbacks.
Figures also show that the retailer had sold more than three times as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009.
“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 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.”
In other news the company has announced it will be the exclusive retailer for a number of the “most influential authors” after signing a deal to sell 20 books – including Norman Mailer’s ‘The Naked and the Dead’ and Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ – published by the Wylie Agency’s new Odyssey Editions imprint.
Amazon says this is the first time the titles have been available electronically and it has exclusive rights to sell the titles for two years.
Other titles included in the deal include ‘London Fields’ by Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and John Updike’s Rabbit Run and sequels.