Attached is a spreadsheet containing 250 titles that I own - most as pbooks, a few as ebooks. These aren't necessarily titles I or anyone else is looking for right now but they are ones that I have actually spent money on in the past and most of them I would love to have as ebooks. I've then gone to the Amazon and Sony sites to see if they sell them as ebooks and I've also looked at the Amazon site to see if they are still in print (many I bought decades ago). I figure you can't really blame them for not making ebooks available for titles you can't buy in pbook form. I've omitted public domain titles and textbooks. The books include Fiction, SciFi, Fantasy, Science, History, Philosophy, Civil Affairs, Spiritual, and other Nonfiction books. I quit at 250 because I didn't want to spend forever at this. It took me six hours as it is. Here's what I found:
- Of the 250 titles, 205 are currently in print (i.e., in pbook form).
- Of the 45 that aren't in print, 0 are available in ebook form.
- Of the 205 titles currently in print, 52 of them (25%) are available in ebook form.
- Of the 52 available as ebooks, Amazon had 51 one of them and Sony had 45 of them.
- Amazon had 7 ebooks that Sony did not.
- Sony had 1 ebook that Amazon did not.
Also, for a few authors (Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Ian Stewart), I noticed that Amazon had several more titles listed as ebooks than Sony, although the titles weren't in my list of 250. There were no cases I noted where Sony had more titles for an author than Amazon. There was also one reference book,
The Dictionary of Cliches, where Amazon didn't have the ebook by the particular author I have, but they had similar ebooks by other authors. Sony did not.
About 22 of the 52 titles that are available in ebook form are ones that I have bought in the last nine months since I bought my Reader and might not have bought at all if I did not have a Reader. Since then, I have been leaning towards buying ebooks instead of pbooks. That biases the percentage of my titles available in that form to the high side. If I just consider the titles that I had as of last July, then the percentage that are now available in ebook form is about 15% instead of 25%.
