Early in 2010, Amazon revealed that sales of Kindle books were greater than sales of hardback books.Now it seems that Kindle book sales have overtaken paperback sales as well. It can only be a matter of time before Kindle book sales are higher than both hardbacks and paperbacks combined.

It’s almost inevitable in a way.After all, people who are prepared to shell out $ 139 for a Kindle reader are going to be the ones who read a lot of books aren’t they? Of course, there will always be some book lovers who prefer the feel of a traditional printed book – but, over the piece, we do seem to be heading towards a situation where e-books assume ever greater importance in the literary world.

There’s certainly no shortage of Kindle books for prospective customers to choose from.At the moment there are over 800,000 Kindle books to choose from on the Amazon website. That number is growing by the day – and there are another 1.8 million out of copyright books which can be downloaded for free. These include some classic works by the likes of Jules Verne, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare among others.

Amazon has also made a whole host of free apps available which allow Kindle books to be read without the use of a Kindle reader. Apps exist for the Mac, the PC, the iPad, the iPhone, the Blackberry and any device running the Android operating system. An app for the new HP tablet computer is said to be in the pipeline. What this means is that users needn’t worry about their Kindle becoming obsolete. Each app also serves as an additional sales outlet for Amazon.

Amazon are estimated to enjoy around about a 90% share of the current e-book market. Clearly that cannot continue in the long term, industry watchers are predicting a roughly equal three way split between Amazon, Apple and Google by 2015. However, those are the same analysts who forecast that the launch of the Apple iPad would be the death of the Kindle, and they didn’t exactly get that right did they?

In point of fact, the new third generation Kindle reader is selling more quickly than ever. It was Amazon’s best selling product (again) over the 2010 Christmas sales period, and the Kindle has now been Amazon’s number one selling item for eighteen months. On the basis of recent sales trends, the forecast Kindle sales for 2011 has been raised from 5 million to 8 million. Whilst some rationalisation of the market seems certain in future, there is little sign of the dominance of Amazon’s Kindle reader diminishing significantly in the short to medium term.

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