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Yesterday Amazon crowed that the Kindle has reached a “tipping point”:

“We’ve reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle — the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189,” said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. 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.”

The actual numbers Bezos is quoting are as follows:

“Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.”

The NY Times gets all Agent Smithy and says that is the sound of inevitability:

“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.”

Not so fast. Nobody’s talking about paperbacks here, just hardbacks. If hardbacks were priced a bit more sanely, this discussion wouldn’t even be happening.