The NY Times has finally decided to go ahead and do what their competitors started doing long ago – including electronic books in their ranking of the best selling books in the U.S.A.
The NY Times has now started including e-book sales in their list of best sellers. Their competitors had started this practice much earlier.
In fact, the Billboard charts, which are in many ways the music industry’s equivalent of the New York Times’ Bestseller list, included the sales of electronic music and radio airplays when determining the Hot 100 much before that.
According to the statistics available from the NY Times, e-books seem to be selling much faster than the regular print versions. This is especially true in the fiction category and also to a large extent in the non-fiction category.
Interestingly, the top 5 titles in the e-book versions and the print versions are the same, but the top 5 titles in the hard-back and paper-back versions of the printed books are different.
The fact that e-books are selling faster than the printed ones has also been corroborated by USA Today. The rapidly growing sale of e-books is bound to lead to the question of piracy.
It is a well known fact that people generally exchange their books with their friends and colleagues. In fact, an old proverb says that one of the best things about gifting someone a book is that you can always borrow it from them. If this were to start happening with e-books, it will invariably lead to allegations of piracy from publishers and sellers such as Amazon.
