Amazon CEO on Kindle growth: "It’s astonishing"

From the NYTimes:

Of all the books that Amazon sells, what percentage are digital books?

For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition. It won’t be too long before we’re selling more electronic books than we are physical books.

How quickly are paper books migrating into their digital equivalents?

When we launched Kindle two years ago, it was 90,000 titles, and today it’s more than 350,000. We’re adding thousands of titles every week. Our vision is every book ever printed in every language, all available within 60 seconds.


Video: What Can Amazon Kindle 2 Do for You?

What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub?

I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.

My opinion: With the recent addition of PDF support for Kindle2 (the smaller version), you can carry hundreds of presentations/lectures. Kindle also has text-to-speech and the font sizes are kind to the eyes. The free Internet access through a device-based browser is unmatched among the current e-readers. The $259 price tag is a bit steep but this is a useful learning device that is as groundbreaking as the iPod touch was when it first launched.

Video: Medieval Helpdesk Solves Problems With a New Technology: The Book.

References:

Book Learning. NYTimes.