Get E-book or forget the Book

Yes you are reading absolutely right title because Amazon.com announced Thursday it is selling more Kindle e-books than print books, either hardcover or paperback.

Amazon said since April 1, it has been selling 105 Kindle e-books for every 100 print books. Free Kindle books are excluded from that count and if free books were included, the number would be even higher.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the e-book threshold arrived sooner than expected. “Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books,” he said. “We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly.” Amazon has sold print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four.

Amazon doesn’t share sales numbers, but said it had sold more than three times as many Kindles books thus far in 2011, as it had in the same period in 2010.

The e-book surge is one of the biggest indicators of the impact of technology on culture, and the nation’s public librarians have been careful observers of the trend for years. Many public libraries already offer e-book borrowing for free, subject to a library user loading special software on a desktop computer, mobile device or some e-book readers.

The convenience of replacing a heavy printed book, or several, on a lightweight e-reader is appealing, especially for somebody taking a long vacation.

“This is the latest and greatest technology, although many don’t embrace it for one reason or another and might prefer holding an actual book or feel e-readers are too complicated “.

“Some people buck modern trends and would use a rotary phone if they could. Still, a lot of people use e-books almost exclusively.”

While the Nook and Sony e-readers allow open e-book library borrowing, Librarians are hopeful that Kindles will soon expand beyond borrowing only Kindle books from libraries. (In April, Amazon announced it would allow Kindle book-borrowing from 11,000 U.S. libraries later this year. )

Users of e-readers tend to favor e-book purchasing rather than borrowing, since the software and download is relatively quick and easy for a purchase.

“Borrowing an e-book is overwhelming sometimes, and the way OverDrive works is complex for some people to get onto their devices, whatever those might be,” she said. First, you have to see what book is available and then download the e-reader software and then load the actual e-book onto the device. “It’s cumbersome.”

Soon enough e-book borrowing will be much easier and more commonplace. For now, the inevitable replacement of print books with e-books continues unabated.

“That way, anybody can read them, even when the library is closed.”