Amazon.com announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.

Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.

Books Then and Now

“The road to knowledge begins with the turn of the page.” Anonymous

Today:

“The road to knowledge begins with the press of a button.” JC

Past:

“A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas—a place where history comes to life.” Norman Cousins

“A good library is a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet.”Samuel Niger

Today:

“A good library will fit in the palm of your hand.” JC

Quotes about Books and e-books

“A book is a human-powered film projector (complete with feature film) that advances at a speed fully customized to the viewer’s mood or fancy. This rare harmony between object and user arises from the minimal skills required to manipulate a bound sequence of pages. Each piece of paper embodies a corresponding instant of time which remains frozen until liberated by the act of turning a page.” The Reactive Square - John Maeda

“We read about 1,000 times more than we write.” Xerox PARC – Rich Gold

“We think of an eBook as an intelligent pet.” BeeHive Hypertext - Talan Memmot

“It took people 10 years to figure out that while stuck in a morning commute, they could be listening to a book.” Publishers Weekly- Paul Hilts

“Change can be scary. When papyrus replaced clay tablets, and the Gutenberg press calligraphy, did a bit of panic set in? Are we in the midst of a revolution of similar proportion? Very probably.” Susan McLester

“We should not see print and electronic literature as in competition, but rather in conversation. The more voices that join in, the richer the dialogue is likely to be.”

N. Katherine Hayles

“I cannot live without books.” Thomas Jefferson

The population of the United States is approx. 310 million.

160 million are retired.

That leaves 140 million to do the work.

There are 85 million in school.

Which leaves 55 million to do the work.

Of this there are 35 million employed by the federal government.

Leaving 15 million to do the work.

2.8 million are in the armed forces preoccupied with killing Osama

Bin-Laden.

Which leaves 12.2 million to do the work.

Take from that total the 10.8 million people who work for state and city

Governments. And that leaves 1.4 million to do the work.

At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals.

Leaving 1,212,000 to do the work.

Now, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons

That leaves just two people to do the work

You and me.

And there you are,

Sitting on your ass,

At your computer, reading jokes.

Nice. Real nice.

YouTube has launched a new video channel called ‘YouTube 5 Year Channel’ to mark its fifth birthday.

1,000,000
In September 2005, Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho’s ‘Touch of Gold’ Nike advert became the first YouTube video to receive a million views.

2007
In December 2007 the Queen launched The Royal Channel, which features her annual Christmas Day message and shows recent and historical footage of the Royal family. In early 2009 Barack Obama and the Pope launched their own channels.

1,700
The number of years that it would take to watch every video on YouTube.

100
The number of years of video that is scanned by YouTube’s Content ID technology every day. Content ID is YouTube’s copyright fingerprinting system which allows rights holders to block or make money from unauthorised use of their material. It is free of charge and being used by 1,000 content partners globally.

70
The percentage of YouTube traffic that comes from outside the US.

24
The number of hours of video that are uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day. This is up 20 per cent from May 2009, when it was getting 20 hours of video uploaded per minute.

23
The number of countries for which YouTube has a localised service. YouTube has been translated into 24 languages.

15
The average number of minutes a YouTube users spends on the site every day. Chad Hurley, YouTube’s chief executive and co-founder, told The Telegraph last month that he wants the site to be watched in the same way as television, up from 15 minutes per day to an average of five hours.

Things are changing so quickly!!!

The first WiMAX-capable smartphone is said to be slated for introduction next week by Sprint Nextel.

The phone will be the widely rumored HTC Supersonic, according to a report in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal citing the ever-loquacious “people familiar with the matter.”

The introductory honors will be borne by Sprint Nextel chief executive Dan Hesse at next week’s CTIA Wirelessshow in Las Vegas, Nevada, perhaps in a presentation during the The Path to 4G all-day session on Tuesday. Hesse is also expected to pump the Supersonic during his keynote presentation on Wednesday.

As The Reg has repeatedly reported, the race to 4G between WiMAX and LTE continues to accelerate. WiMAX may have a head start – Sprint partner Clearwire is busily building out its WiMAX network, with the goal of covering 120 million potential customers by the end of this year – but LTE is rapidly gaining support from such mobile-service heavyweights as AT&T, Verizon, Orange, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and others.

Sprint is betting heavily on Clearwire. Witness not only its $7.4bn stake in a $14.5bn Clearwire joint venture in May of 2008, but also the additional $1.18bn it pumped into the company last November.

It can be argued that the introduction of the HTC Supersonic now – it had originally been rumored to appear later this year – is an effort to entice customers hungry for high-speed mobile broadband to sign long-term contracts before the LTE tsumani swamps the market late this year and into 2011.

If so, the Supersonic appears to be a good phone upon which to bet the farm – at least if leaked deails turn out to be correct. The smartphone is reported to have a 4.3-inch 480×800 display, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor running the HTC Sense UI on top of Android 2.1, and to be equipped with such now-standard smartphone niceties as a touch interface, compass, accelerometer, Bluetooth, five-megapixel camera, and GPS.

We’ll find out more next week – that is, if those “people familiar with the matter” prove to be correct.

Losses from cybercrime and online scams more than doubled in 2009 to 559 million dollars as Internet criminals used more sophisticated techniques, an FBI-led task force said Friday.

A customer browses the internet in a cybercafe. Non-delivery of items bought on the Internet was the biggest source of fraud, accounting for 19 percent of losses, and credit card and auction fraud each accounted for 10 percent.