Track # of Amazon ebooks that are available

[gteague]

Originally Posted by Zoot

Well, if you go to the Kindle Books section on Amazon and change it to sort by publication date so the newest stuff is first and then page thought it for a while it becomes clear that a lot of this is rubbish.

<del>

i do have to say that i don't consider my submission 'rubbish'. i was helping edit a book of fairy tales for a friend and wrote my own fairy tale. but it didn't fit the 'style' of the book, so i just put it up on my web page until now. i really do think it's worth the 99-cents i priced it at (well, maybe 49-cents might have been better, but there were already a million seletions at that price point), price chosen on the basis of what one song costs at apple itunes store.

/guy

[cfc]

91,852 Kindle books available.

[azog]

I was curious myself, so I see 92,221 showing today. At least 20 pages of those are pre-releases...

Edit: They're playing games. Five minutes later, they show 91,938, and sorting by pub date doesn't show all those pre-releases.

[markbot]

92,694 current

[hkabir]

In last couple of days, amazon has added more than 800 kindle edition ebooks. However, here is disturbing story about how they are distributed among different categories: http://www.kindlenews.info

[markbot]

don't forget that any joe can now publish books....and this will be added to the Kindle list.

[dougcar]

Of the twelve I've tried, only two were in Kindle form. I kind of expected that with 92,000, wow, anything i wanted would be kindleable.

[markbot]

94,107 as of Dec 11, 2007

[JSWolf]

The number of available ebooks is irrelevant. What is relevant is what ebook are available that you actually want. Before you purchase a reader of any kind, go look at the various online shops and see what you find and then make your choice. Without the content, the reader is just a doorstop.

[azog]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The number of available ebooks is irrelevant. What is relevant is what ebook are available that you actually want. Before you purchase a reader of any kind, go look at the various online shops and see what you find and then make your choice. Without the content, the reader is just a doorstop.

Not entirely. I'd say the basic premise of "supply and demand" operates here. A greater number of books would increase the sales of the Kindle. Higher sales of the Kindle will drive up demand on content.

[jasonkchapman]

Originally Posted by azog

Not entirely. I'd say the basic premise of "supply and demand" operates here. A greater number of books would increase the sales of the Kindle. Higher sales of the Kindle will drive up demand on content.

Unless there's a market backlash over the extremely low signal-to-noise ratio. That goes to reputation and loss of customer goodwill.

Besides the same forces affect every other e-book reader as well. In fact, for the health of the industry overall, I would track the multi-format offerings at Fictionwise and the other vendors not tied to a specific unit.

[silvania]

Do we really want ebook vendors playing these kinds of number games? Adding content for content sake, no matter what the editorial control?

For example, any ebook vendor can add tens of thousands of "titles" to their catalog by picking up self-published books published by the likes of Xlibris or iUniverse from LSI. But these titles are typically so poor that you will find multiple spelling errors on every page. There is zero editorial control.

By focusing on the amazon title counts, which by the way do include tons of self-published items, are we forcing every ebook vendor to compete with these numbers by adding a lot of muck that is not worth reading?

Just a thought.

[carld]

I was looking at the Kindle store this morning, and sorted them by publishing date and was surprised that there weren't a lot more self-published books there. Although there were a number of classics available elsewhere for free, most were good solid books. Also some of the apparently self-published books actually looked interesting.

I've read though that you can't preview the self-published books by reading the first chapter, that's disappointing if true.

[silvania]

Originally Posted by carld

I was looking at the Kindle store this morning, and sorted them by publishing date and was surprised that there weren't a lot more self-published books there. Although there were a number of classics available elsewhere for free, most were good solid books. Also some of the apparently self-published books actually looked interesting.

I've read though that you can't preview the self-published books by reading the first chapter, that's disappointing if true.

How do you know which books are self-published? There are numerous "vanity presses" who do ebooks, like Xlibris, FirstBooks, iUniverse (actually i believe FirstBooks renamed themselves iUniverse to try to avoid detection as a vanity press). These companies take a fee, usually a few hundred dollars, to accept any book no matter how bad, then put those books through the major ebook feeds.

The titles may look very interesting. But your interest soon dissipates as you find the writing is pure gibberish with 2 to 5 spelling errors on each and every page. I'm not saying every single one is like that, but I have investigated some of these books and a goodly percentage really are that bad.

[carld]

Originally Posted by silvania

How do you know which books are self-published? There are numerous "vanity presses" who do ebooks, like Xlibris, FirstBooks, iUniverse (actually i believe FirstBooks renamed themselves iUniverse to try to avoid detection as a vanity press). These companies take a fee, usually a few hundred dollars, to accept any book no matter how bad, then put those books through the major ebook feeds.

The titles may look very interesting. But your interest soon dissipates as you find the writing is pure gibberish with 2 to 5 spelling errors on each and every page. I'm not saying every single one is like that, but I have investigated some of these books and a goodly percentage really are that bad.

Well, of course I don't actually *know*, so I said apparently. I could have been clearer about that though. However, sometimes you can just tell based on the cover, the description and the price what's ilikely self-published. If it's something I'm really interested in and there's no sample chapter I'll probably google the author and book to see what comes up.

And I do expect a lot of the self-published stuff is trash (more the pity that they don't have preview chapters) but there's bound to be some gems in there. One I saw that interested me was "A Warlock's Words" by Ben Ezzell, I might just give something like that a chance based on the description. I'm assuming that he's self-published but again, don't actually *know* it.

http://www.amazon.com/A-Warlock%2527...7640513&sr=1-4