Publishing: E-books outsell hardcover books in the USA

This year e-books outsold hardcover books in the USA. The Wall Street Journal reported that over the past three months e-books grew in popularity unlike physical books.

According to “Amazon” 180 e-Books were sold for every 100 hardcover books. However publishers reassure that the current state of the book market doesn’t necessarily mean the decline of the physical books’ era. Amazon said its hardback book unit sales also continued to increase.

It is worth mentioning that a year and a half ago skeptics declared that e-Books would not manage to win the trust of readers, explaining it by the affection for traditional books with an ink smell. However a chance to own a whole library in the electronic format, whose books’ price was favorably lower than that of hardcover editions, became a powerful argument. Mike Shatzkin, an expert in this industry, is sure that all the publishers should as soon as possible move to eBooks, because in the future decade print books’ sales will make up less than 25 % of the total book trade.