E-books are still doing very well, and Kindle sales have seen a surprising resurgence. That was one of the themes that emerged last year. You will remember Mark Williams gave us one of his timely reminders of how woefully short the official figures fall and the increase to KDP Select payments, which now top $600 million a year and then some. But how are people reading those e-books?
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
Kindle Sales Surge
Last year, dedicated e-readers seemed to be on the way out. Reports suggested Kindle sales were nearly nonexistent. But Amazon has just announced its best sales of Kindle devices in a decade. Year-over-year sales in the last quarter of 2024 were up more than 30 percent. And, confirming the hints we had at the time, this has been largely due to the new range of Kindles, including the much-heralded new Kindle Paperwhite, which came on the market in time for Black Friday.
While we have Amazon and Kindle on our minds, I share this simply because it’s not every day I see a large picture of Kindle Storyteller in TechCrunch. Unfortunately, it is not the high-profile indie author award being promoted right now, but rather the fact that the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, the body responsible for clamping down on market share abuse and anticompetitive practices, has just appointed former Amazon bigwig Doug Gurr as its new CEO. Competitors of Amazon are not pleased.
AI Art Auction Sparks Controversy
And speaking of people being displeased and coming together to write open letters (as happened in protest at Gurr’s appointment), Christie’s, the world’s most famous auction house, has announced it will be holding its first dedicated AI art auction. The event is due to take place at the Rockefeller Center Gallery in New York on February 20 and will feature, inter alia, a painting robot. So far, the signatories to the complaint letter number 1,800 and counting. The complaint centers, as you can imagine, around the issue of generative AI platforms gaining—or not gaining—the consent of those on whose work they are trained.
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