“Right now, we’re seeing the highest sales of Kindle in more than a decade—20 billion pages are currently read every month,” claims Panay. “And it turns out the majority of this new cohort are millennials and Gen Z—this is the fastest growing segment.”
Kevin Keith goes further, explaining that while social media used to be a distraction from books, it’s now a driving force for selling Kindles to new, younger readers. The “BookTok” phenomenon, he says, has a lot to do with that, and the hashtag, which includes people sharing book reviews and recommendations on TikTok, has amassed almost 39 million videos and more than 200 billion views.
“There’s definitely a bit of a TikTok/BookTok effect right now, and this has also transcended into Reels, into Instagram, into Facebook,” Keith says. “So you see across the board in terms of the social media impact that used to be a headwind, that used to be pulling people away from reading—now it’s actually driving people to read.”
“It’s been more than two years now that we’ve seen this growth rate,” he adds. “When we say sales are at their highest in a decade, this is after multiple years of double-digit growth.”
There is data to suggest this might be the start of a wider trend, with the e-reader market expected to start growing again between now and 2029. Keeping the emotional connection between readers and their books is important in this, insists Panay, who cites this as a reason why people will swallow the $120 hike over the best-selling Kindle Paperwhite.
“Value is not in the look and feel of a device,” he says, without hesitation. “Value is in the emotion you’ll be able to pull out of having a color screen. At this point it’s a choice, and that’s what’s beautiful. If you want color, it’s now there for you.”
Whether better late than never works out for Kindle remains to be seen, but Panay is banking on that emotional connection playing its part. In an overly connected world, he says that for its users, Kindle is a sanctuary—a device with no distractions, no notifications. Of course, books have been doing that for centuries.
“That sanctuary is very real,” says Panay. “You pick up a book [on your Kindle] and you start reading … multitasking doesn’t exist because you disappear into that moment. We need some of that right now, more than ever.”