Kindle e-book sales surpass print in UK

Amazon, the biggest retailer in the UK, announced last week that its e-book sales have overtaken printed book sales flipping a new page for the publishing industry.

After being introduced to readers in the UK just two years ago, Amazon said British readers now buy 114 e-books for every one hundred printed books sold via its store since this year.

“Customers in the UK are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books, even as our print business continues to grow,” said Jorrit Van der Meulen, vice-president of Kindle EU, according to the Guardian. “We hit this milestone in the U.S. less than four years after introducing Kindle, so to reach this landmark after just two years in the UK is remarkable and shows how quickly UK readers are embracing Kindle. As a result of the success of Kindle, we're selling more books than ever before on behalf of authors and publishers.”

The changes of readers’ habits also note the so-called “reading renaissance”:

“As soon as we started selling Kindles it became our bestselling product on Amazon.co.uk so there was a very quick adoption … [And they] are buying four times more books prior to owning a Kindle," an Amazon spokeswoman said, Tech Hunter reported. “Generally there seems to be … a love of a reading and a renaissance as a result of Kindle being launched.”

 It indicates the convenience of ebooks and the popularity of Kindle, drawing a bright future for the probably incoming debut of Kindle Fire, a media consumption tablet, in the UK.

However, e-books challenging the sales of printed books is not news. While some critics are worrying about the traditional publishing industry and book shops, Jonathan Rupin, web editor for bookseller Foyles, said the whole book industry must get used to the trend.

“The proportion of sales that are taken up by ebooks will continue to increase,” he told the BBC. "At some point they will overtake printed sales across the whole market."

Although He said online buying could put smaller businesses at risk, he was confident in that that more traditional bookshops still had an important role by explain that for every worrying story he has heard about a good independent book store flourishing.

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