In a recent announcement, the largest online retailer Amazon. com said that every month of the second quarter witnessed an accelerated growth in sales its Kindle digital reader, with sales of e-books exceeding hardcover editions.

Going by the statistics, for every 100 hardcover editions that Amazon sold during the second quarter, the sales of Kindle books was 143 - with the number touching up to 180 for the month of July. Furthermore, Amazon has also said that the Kindle book sales this year even surpassed the broader e-book sales growth reported by the Association of American Publishers, for the month of May.

In addition, the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed in a statement that the pace of Kindle sales has also increased three-fold ever since the company slashed the price of the e-reader by 27 percent - from $259 to $189 last month.

The company said that, as compared to the number of Kindle books sold in the 2009 first half, the sales this time round for the first half of the year were three times more – with almost 81 percent of its 630,000 e-books being up to $9.99.

Noting that Amazon had reached “a tipping point with the new price of Kindle,” Bezos said: “Amazon. com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books -- astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.”