08-08-2010, 04:51 PM | #1 |
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Amazon's aim of every book being available on the Kindle
Amazon's stated aim is to have every book available on the Kindle. Their book store claims something like 30 million titles, while Kindle offers about half a million (bit less in UK, bit more in US). Have they got a snowball's chance in hell of realising their aim, or is this just marketing? At first glance, this looks like getting 60x what they already have.
On a related note, "Harry Potter" lists about 7000 titles - about 1000 times the number of actual titles. So, maybe that 30 million is really a lot fewer actual individual titles, with fewer duplicates in the Kindle space. (I know that there are more than 7 books that would legitimately come up under the search, but still there are a lot of duplicates). |
08-08-2010, 05:15 PM | #2 |
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I'd say no, not all books. Some authors and publishers will simply refuse to allow their books to be published as ebooks. Could Amazon eventually make the majority of their catalog available for the Kindle? Yeah, I think so.
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08-08-2010, 05:22 PM | #3 |
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I hope they are going to start with german books, too. No bestseller is available at the moment at amazon. Just a few thousand books in german at all in the US shop.
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08-08-2010, 05:46 PM | #4 |
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Well as long as there is a push for it, the number of books available in ebook format will rise. They will probably not get all books, but they can get a lot more than there are now.
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08-09-2010, 03:14 AM | #5 |
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The vast majority of new books do seem to be appearing as ebooks. The challenge will be dealing with the enormous back-catalogues that publishers have. The problem here is that in many cases the publisher will not have ebook publication rights to those books, so it will involve new contracts, etc. It's not a straightforward process.
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08-09-2010, 06:34 AM | #6 |
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It's a goal which they want to work toward. Not just every book, but every book in every language ever made. It won't happen in Jeff Bezo's lifetime. Maybe his grandchildren will see it. Probably not. But it's good to have goals.
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08-09-2010, 07:20 AM | #7 |
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Keep in mind that when, as Ben says, Amazon's "book store claims something like 30 million titles", that doesn't mean they are able to supply 30 million titles, even if you take third-party sales into account (as in "Available from these sellers"). And of course it doesn't mean they have anything like that number of titles in stock.
It's more likely that the figure refers to the number of books that have an ISBN for the countries and languages where Amazon operates. In theory, any bookseller can order any book with an ISBN, but that's not much use if a book is out of print and any second-hand or remainder copies on the market can't be traced. So the figure of 30 million doesn't really mean much, nor does the fact that it's 60 tmes the number of ebooks available. |
08-09-2010, 09:11 AM | #8 | |
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Pretty sure Jeff Bezo's grandchildren won't see it, of course |
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08-09-2010, 10:50 AM | #9 | |
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If we do as well with books as we have with music, that would be a massive step forward, of course - but that has taken more than 20 years since CDs first appeared. |
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08-09-2010, 01:16 PM | #10 | |
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