Two years after the Kindle's UK launch, Amazon's digital book sales have outpaced all physical sales. UK readers were introduced to the Kindle in August 2010 and by May of the following year, ebooks were outselling hardcovers in the region at a rate of more than two to one. The latest update includes both hard and softcover books.
Amazon noted that it's particularly thrilled because it reached this milestone in the UK twice as fast as the US, where it took over two years for ebooks to outsell hardcovers by double and nearly four years to pass all physical books. Despite this rapid adoption of digital books, the company notes that its print business has continued to grow.
Amazon.co.uk has sold 114 Kindle books for every 100 print books so far in 2012, excluding free Kindle books while including hard copies without digital versions. The company reports that Kindle owners are more inclined to read, buying four times as much material as they did previously. Many of them also continue to buy physical books.
Three of this year's top 10 Kindle authors – Nick Spalding, Katia Lief and Kerry Wilkinson – were published via Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which offers up to 70% of royalties. As usual, Amazon is shy about providing raw sales figures, but it noted that Wilkinson has sold over 300,000 copies of his books since last July, while EL James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey, has broken records on both Amazon's physical and digital fronts, selling over two million Kindle books in only four months.