MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Effect of Kindle on Sony's Content Offerings

vivaldirules · 01-13-2008, 12:32 PM

I see from the Amazon's totals by category for the Kindle includes 1,546 ebooks under "Literary Fiction". After scanning the books in that category, my guess is that half or more of all the public domain titles that they sell would be in there together with some more modern literary titles. There are some public domain titles in other categories (e.g., Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" is in Politics and Current Events) but I think we can probably assume that there are only a thousand or so possible titles total that have multiple editions assuming all of these would be public domain titles like Moby Dick. That means Amazon's totals would be reduced by only one or two percent at most if you subtracted all of these.

So then the question is how many of Amazon's totals are self-published books like SEEXY which is described as "Hot, Hot, Hot Politics by SEEXY" or "Pragati" published by Nationalinterest.in. I can only guess that these will usually be rather cheap titles. If you sort the categories by cost from low to high, you'll see that there aren't many titles in each category that are less than a dollar or two. But it's hard to tell without a downloadable database.

So my guess is that removing self-published titles and those with multiple editions brings Amazon's ebook total down to maybe like 92,000 to 95,000 from their listed total of 97,053 today. Also, I don't want to pick on self-published titles. I just think people would find a total of more conventional fare of more use in judging if they're likely to find something at Amazon that they want to read.

01-13-2008, 12:32 PM	#47
vivaldirules When's Doughnut Day? Posts: 10,059 Karma: 13675475 Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: Houston, TX, US Device: Sony PRS-505, iPad	I see from the Amazon's totals by category for the Kindle includes 1,546 ebooks under "Literary Fiction". After scanning the books in that category, my guess is that half or more of all the public domain titles that they sell would be in there together with some more modern literary titles. There are some public domain titles in other categories (e.g., Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" is in Politics and Current Events) but I think we can probably assume that there are only a thousand or so possible titles total that have multiple editions assuming all of these would be public domain titles like Moby Dick. That means Amazon's totals would be reduced by only one or two percent at most if you subtracted all of these. So then the question is how many of Amazon's totals are self-published books like SEEXY which is described as "Hot, Hot, Hot Politics by SEEXY" or "Pragati" published by Nationalinterest.in. I can only guess that these will usually be rather cheap titles. If you sort the categories by cost from low to high, you'll see that there aren't many titles in each category that are less than a dollar or two. But it's hard to tell without a downloadable database. So my guess is that removing self-published titles and those with multiple editions brings Amazon's ebook total down to maybe like 92,000 to 95,000 from their listed total of 97,053 today. Also, I don't want to pick on self-published titles. I just think people would find a total of more conventional fare of more use in judging if they're likely to find something at Amazon that they want to read.