Closing in on a million Kindle store titles

Closing in on a million Kindle store titles

When Amazon first introduced the Kindle in this November 19, 2007

Introducing Amazon Kindle

they said they had “More than 90,000…” titles.

Now, not even four years later, the US store has more than ten times that many (994,904 when I run it this morning).

That’s amazing growth!

I’ve been watching this pretty closely…I know, I know, it’s just a number, but it’s fun. 🙂

Lately, the numbers went up and down a bit…they appear to have removed a number of titles (which might have been related to concerns expressed about duplicated Private Label Rights titles).

We’ve been back on track the last few days, though…on the order of 1,000 a day in the US store.

Based on that pace, we should certainly solidly hit that million title mark before

Amazon’s 2nd Quarter results conference call

a week from Tuesday.

Since any time people are told something good, a certain percentage of them react with cynicism (“Yeah, I’m too smart for you to make me happy!”) 😉 , let’s look at some of the knocks there are going to be…

1.”There aren’t that many books in my country!”

That’s true. Canada, for example, has something like 770,000 titles. However, that’s a lot more titles than the US store had when it had been open an equivalent amount of time. Amazon isn’t capriciously keeping books from you…they’d sell books on the moon, if they could. 🙂 It’s a question of licensing and legality. Some of that will change…newly licensed books are more likely to have global rights. I’ve been hearing some odd things about Canada, though…with e-books not being available in the Kindle store while they are available in Canadian e-bookstores. The rumor is that the Canadian government gives an incentive to publishers to put their books in the Canadian stores. I know they do grants for publishing, but if anybody has details on something that would make Canadian publishers not put their books in the Kindle store (a link to a government document, ideally) I’d love to see it.

2.” The number is inflated because there are lots of duplicated books!”

Search the Kindle store for Pride and Prejudice, and you get 360 results. However, they may not be as silly as it sounds. Some of those are literary criticism, and many have annotations. In fact, Amazon now requires that publishers using Kindle Direct Publishing have to add value to a public domain work to put it in the Kindle store…significant historical context, new illustrations, that kind of thing. I do some work with a non-profit, and they pulled a book (which had been for sale)…I wrote a new afterword to provide that sort of context. It took some real work to do, since I wanted to actually have links and resources. I think it legitimately adds value. Oh, and why an afterword instead of an introduction? So you get more of the actual book when you get a sample…I put my work in the back.

The other type of duplication, which I mentioned above, is that which involves Private Label Rights. I linked my post on it above, but I think the problem has been exaggerated in some coverage. Basically, somebody sells the rights to a publish a book to individuals…the same rights to large numbers of individuals, they hope. That results in the exact same book appearing multiple times. I think that’s a very small amount of what is in the store, though.

3. “It’s’ a bunch of self-published junk!”

Please…we say “independently-published”. 🙂 Yes, there are many self-published books in the Kindle store…at one point, I estimated 20,000 a month being added. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. One of the best books I’ve read went through the KDP (then the Digital Text Platform)…In Her Name, by Michael R. Hicks.

Are there books in the KDP that are…oh, somebody’s grocery lists for the past five years? Sure, probably. Maybe you like grocery lists, though…

4. “Barnes & Noble has twice that many!”

B&N is counting large numbers of public domain books. That’s fine, I like a lot of PD…but Amazon has more in-copyright books. Some of Amazon’s numbers are public domain books…interestingly, though, as I check this morning using both

http://wwww.ereaderiq.com

and Amazon itself (using +domain in the search), I’m not getting any. They may have changed their classifications.

5. “That includes games!”

Yes, it does…there still aren’t a lot of active content titles, but they are there.

I think those are some of the main things we’ll hear…oh, and that they don’t a specific book somebody wants.

Is Amazon making progress on “every book ever published?” I’m actually not sure that books are being Kindleized faster than they are being published…if we take digital only out of the equation. Amazon lists over 20 million printed books in their store. I’ll guarantee you, though, they had more than a tenth of that four years ago…so digital is growing faster.

Tuesday is traditionally a day for releasing books, so maybe we’ll hit the million title mark on this coming Tuesday…that would make sense.

I’ll let you know when I see that million mark.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.