The most startling thing Jeff Bezos said today at Amazon’s launch of the Kindle DX, it’s large-format Kindle optimized for textbooks and newspapers, was this statistic: For books that are available on the Kindle, sales are already 35 percent of the same books in print. In other words, if a paper book sells 10,000 copies on Amazon, it will sell an additional 3,500 digital copies on the Kindle. Let me repeat that, digital books via the Kindle are selling at 35 percent the level of physical books 18 months after launch.
That is an amazing ramp up. The Kindle now has 275,000 titles, most of them are the “head” titles that most likely make up the bulk of Amazon’s total book sales. So how much of Amazon’s book sales are now digital? I tried to ask a few Amazon execs here at the press conference, but they won’t say. It is no doubt a huge number. Amazon sells $2.7 billion worth of “media” every quarter, which includes books, music, and movies. Books is still one of its largest categories, if not the largest. Let’s say Amazon sells $1 billion worth of books every quarter. And its top 275,000 titles represent 80 percent of sales. Kindle book sales alone would amount to $280 million ($1.1 billion a year), and that would not include the cost of the device.
I am making these numbers up, but even if you change it to 50 percent, Kindle book sales would be trending at $175 million a quarter ($700 million a year). The Kindle might turn out to be Amazon’s biggest growth business yet.
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