It seems as though we can hardly go a week without some sort of reminder that the rise of ebooks looks to be unstoppable. Whether it’s news of sales figures of the latest bestseller or a story about how more and more authors are turning to ebook independent publishing, there is always something that lets us know this is a big issue.

The latest such story is news from Amazon that tells us ebooks are now significantly more popular than print. According to Amazon, it is now selling 114 Kindle ebooks for every 100 print books it sells.

The other bit of interesting news from this story is the fact that Amazon says people who own Kindles buy on average four times more books than they did before they owned their ereader.

This is arguably good news for the publishing industry as a whole, as it suggests that rather than the decline that has been discussed elsewhere, there are still strong growth areas – people are still interested in books and keen to buy them, even though the means through which they do this is altering and there are undeniably big changes going on.

It’s also good news for independent publishers; most of us who publish our own work do so primarily through ebooks and platforms such as Amazon’s KDP. The fact that ebooks are now so popular perhaps means we can worry less about the need to sell print copies of our work as well, although print is also still a major market that deserves attention. Plus, when we consider that Amazon has more competition for print sales than it perhaps does for ebooks, it suggests that more research needs to be done to get a really clear picture of the print/ebook divide.

Still, it’s always nice to see encouraging signs for a form of publishing that many of us self-publishers make use of, so it will be interesting to see the next set of data to see whether the growth of ebooks continues. You can read more about the story here.