According to a report in the Daily Mail, e-readers such as the iPad Amazon’s Kindle are becoming so popular that they are starting to affect sales of paperback books, or so it would seem judging by new sales figures from Nielsen BookScan, which show sales of paperback books down by 25% year-on-year, with only 11.3 million paperback books being sold in the first three months of 2012, as opposed to 14.9 million sold in the same period in 2011. In general, The Mail reports, total book sales have fallen by approximately 11%, although sales of hardback fiction books have stayed stable at around 1.2 million, mainly because people still like to collect them. Author G.P. Taylor told The Mail: “I believe we are seeing the death of the paperback and I would say that by 2012 it will be a little seen commodity.†Meanwhile, publishing magazine The Bookseller said that one in eight adult fiction books purchased is a digital version. One example of the e-book boom is the fact that when the Harry Potter books were made available in digital form for the first time last week, J.K. Rowling’s website raked in £1 million in just a few days, with around £231 being spent per minute on Potter e-books on the website.
Source: Death of the paperback in e-reader revolution: Sales drop by 25% in a year | Mail Online