There's no simple way to sort out which ebook store is the "largest," because many of them sell the same public domain titles, often from the same scanned sources, either Google, Archive, or Gutenberg. Since anyone can grab thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds?) of those ebooks for free, and resell them, either with or without re-converting them to different formats, it's ridiculous to consider claims of "300,000 ebooks" vs "700,000 ebooks"... all that means is that one store has stocked up on more free public content than the other.
Also, some stores offer the same PD content in different formats, or have different original sources, and count those as different ebooks. Fictionwise has three versions of Captains Courageous by Kipling; two cost money and are secured formats, and one is free. Sony had thousands of public domain texts that it sold for $2, but offered 100 books for free to new buyers of the PRS-505, and then it added Google's epub versions, many of the same titles.
No store (rather than publisher, like Baen) makes it clear how many different copyrighted ebooks they offer. And while access to free, public domain books from store-of-your-choice may be a useful resource, sometimes the convenience is countered by formatting and other problems--Fictionwise's free public domain texts are not as good as Mobileread's.
|