Content Kindle Store Science Fiction & Fantasy Scorecard

[dugbug]

This effort is an attempt to rank kindle store by both quality and availability for SF and Fantasy fans. The attached excel spreadsheet has links to locate an individual book in the kindle store for you.

The score is computed as a % of total Philip K Dick, Nebula, Hugo, Clarke, Locus, and World Fantasy awarded books (winners, short-list nominations) that are found in the store. There are 643 books in the spreadsheet to date.

For the curious, I have also ranked the authors with the following formula: +2 for every win, +1 for every short-list nomination. Here are the top 15 along with their score (novels category only).

20 Lois McMaster Bujold
20 Robert A. Heinlein
19 Robert Silverberg
14 Gene Wolfe
14 Orson Scott Card
13 David Brin
13 Ursula K. Le Guin
12 Isaac Asimov
12 Joe Haldeman
12 Poul Anderson
12 Robert J. Sawyer
11 Arthur C. Clarke
11 Connie Willis
11 Frederik Pohl
11 Greg Bear


Enjoy!

Score as of May 1 2010
32%

Trend: UP!

(note attachment is old)

-d

[vivaldirules]

Great job, dugbug!

[MoSo]

Kindle books (from Amazon) tend to be weighted towards recent (as in the past five years) as well. If you updated the list to be "SFF books published in the last decade" it'd get a much higher score. I realize that it might not then be weighted toward what you want to actually read, but the books all tend to be the newer ones, with older stiff coming on line slower (and in a pretty random fashion, IMO).

[dugbug]

This month was a slow one. I won't bother uploading a new spreadsheet. There were four new additions to the kindle store from the awards list:

"A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge
"Redshift Rendezvous" by John E. Stith
"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood (you may recall the movie)
"Glory Road" by Robert A. Heinlein

enjoy
-d

[bakerjw]

Great effort! I appreciate it very much as SciFi is what I normally read.

[dugbug]

Uploaded a new spreadsheet. There were threenew additions to the kindle store from the awards list:

"The Accidental Time Machine" by Joe Haldeman (the first Haldeman book from the list to be kindleized)
"Cosmonaut Keep" by Ken MacLeod
"A Plague of Demons" by Keith Laumer


Im pretty stoked about the Haldeman book.

enjoy
-d

[vivaldirules]

Thanks again, dugbug. I really like that you do this. I took your list of books and searched for them at the Sony store as a comparison (see attached spreadsheet). Of the 437 titles, Sony have 73 of them (16.7%) compared to Amazon who have 109 of them (25.0%). As a Sony Reader owner, I find that really irritating. I know that some authors and publishers are slow to coming around to ebooks. But if Amazon has a title for sale for the Kindle, then the author and publisher have come around. So Sony should have every single title that Amazon has. But they don't. Sony is just being lazy and it's really starting to tick me off.

[dugbug]

Hey thanks for the Sony update. I'll incorporate it so we have one for both stores.

I know they (sony) have been behind. At least the publishers are slowly moving in the right direction

[igorsk]

"A Plague of Demons" is available from Baen in both Mobi and LRF.

[dugbug]

thanks for the feedback everyone.

Sep update:
only one book (so I won't bother uploading the xls), but its a whopper:

Dune (40th anniversary edition)

Enjoy
-d

[random50]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

But if Amazon has a title for sale for the Kindle, then the author and publisher have come around. So Sony should have every single title that Amazon has. But they don't. Sony is just being lazy and it's really starting to tick me off.

There could be more to it than that. Could Amazon be negotiating exclusivity agreements, for example?

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by random50

There could be more to it than that. Could Amazon be negotiating exclusivity agreements, for example?

So far they've been pretty clear about which books are exclusives. I think Amazon being a book seller at the core was more aggressive in getting books in their digital format. Sony now seems ready to be more aggressive as well.

[nekokami]

I wonder what percentage Baen has, by comparison?

[BJWanlund]

I find this intriguing: I was looking for Star Trek & Star Wars books (hey, they're considered sci-fi!), and the only real SW books are the Legacy of the Force series and the New Jedi Order series, while the Star Trek books are absolutely insane, pretty much every Trek book ever written is on the Kindle Store!

BJ

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by nekokami

I wonder what percentage Baen has, by comparison?

Very much smaller. Baen books, by and large, don't get award nominations. I think I recognized seven authors on the spreadsheet as being published by Baen.

The Nebula and World Fantasy awards are peer jury awards. The Hugos are more populist, but even among Hugos, the trend is more literary.

Baen has to content themselves with publishing popular books.
______
Dennis