Almost exactly a decade ago, to coincide with the second anniversary of the launch of the Kindle in the United Kingdom, Amazon UK announced that for the first time it was selling more ebooks than paperback and hardback books combined. The figure the company came up with was that for every 100 printed books Amazon sold, it was selling 114 ebooks. That statistic was specific to Amazon in Britain, and didn’t necessarily reflect the balance between printed and electronic books bought from any other outlet.
The Kindle became the bestselling product on Amazon within just a few months of its launch, and is still selling extremely well because it’s very good at what it does. It’s not the only electronic reader, of course, but it was then far and away the most popular. Today, of course, people tend to read on their smartphones or their tablets, but undeniably the Kindle still has a place in the market, not least because it has a battery life measured in weeks or even months rather than the one-day-if-you’re-lucky battery life of the average smartphone, or even less than that if you still own an old iPhone.
In the trade, one reason for the initial success of the Kindle was believed to be the huge number of sales of novels like Fifty Shades of Grey, some 2 million of which were apparently sold by Amazon in under four months. I’ve read elsewhere that this book is a contender for both the title of ‘fastest selling novel of all time’ and ‘worst novel of all time’, though because I haven’t read it – and have no intention of doing so – I’m not qualified to comment on the latter opinion. One reason for the success of this book and its kin was arguably the fact that women – and it was aimed squarely at this section of the market – could read it on a Kindle without anybody knowing that they were immersed in a racy and semi-pornographic novel.
Interestingly, that was exactly the opposite to one reason given for the success of The Da Vinci Code, which was undeniably a dreadful book, and which was supposed to be popular precisely because it had the words ‘Da Vinci’ printed on its cover. Presumably people reading it thought that others might think them intelligent because of that name.
Another reason for the success of the electronic side of Amazon was of course self-publishing, and the company stated back in 2012 that it had seen a 400% increase in the use of Kindle Direct Publishing over the previous year.
But perhaps one of the most important – and encouraging – pieces of data then released by Amazon was that, according to the company’s figures, the average Kindle owner bought four times more books than people who only bought printed versions. I’d agree with that, because it’s certainly true for me. Precisely because I can buy about half a dozen Kindle downloads for the price of one paperback, and have them delivered in a matter of seconds, I tend to cruise the bestseller lists and buy books in clumps, or whatever the correct mass noun is for more than one book.
And, because each of them costs a lot less than a cup of coffee, even if I decide they’re complete rubbish it really doesn’t matter. And while it’s true that most self-published books have been turned into Kindle downloads precisely because they’re nowhere near good enough for any commercial publisher to even consider, most of the ones I have bought are quite readable. I reckon that out of every 10 Kindle books I buy, one or two will be unreadably bad, one will probably be of publishable standard, and the rest will fall somewhere between these two extremes.
So although the publishing world was in something of a crisis back in 2012, and is in pretty much the same state right now, albeit for different reasons, and as an industry it still doesn’t really know what to do for the best and how to cope with the rise of the ebook, we can at least take comfort in the fact that the future of reading looks as bright as it ever did, even if the medium which is used to display the type on the page has changed dramatically.
