There were some oddities with Kindle content count in the month of September. Just look at these graphs below…
Kindle book count was steadily increasing at 280 books per day for the entire month and Kindle store was about to post a gain of 8K+ books for the month when on the last day there was a sudden drop of 15,245 books. So final monthly delta ended up being -7,131 books with average loss of 238 books per day. I’ve checked today and the numbers are still way down, so it wasn’t a one day thing. So the final count is 342,479. This is about as many books as there were in the beginning of August.
Similar sharp drop happened in Kindle Blogs on the 5th of September. 222 blogs were eliminated from the marketplace. If we disregard this drop, number of blogs was increasing at around 10 new blogs per day which is still fewer than August gains. However with this drop factored the number of blogs increased by only 8. By the way, BlogKindle is still there on the marketplace and you can subscribe to it using your Kindle.
Perhaps Amazon decided to do some house cleaning and eliminate low quality and duplicate content. Perhaps they have made the admission rules more strict. This seems to contrast with Sony/Google strategy of piling in as much public domain content (which is mainly low quality or outdated) to impress customers with raw book numbers.
And finally, here’s a recoup of what happened in the month of September:
- 3rd of September: Kindle 2.0.4 and Kindle DX 2.1.1 software is released but it takes some time for these updates to actually get to the customers. For example my Kindle DX is still at software version 2.1…
- 4th of September: Hacked Kindle running Ubuntu is demonstrated. Kudos to Jesse.
- 5th of September: Saga about deletion of 1984 by Amazon has found closure.
- 10th of September: I’ve purchased Sony PRS-505 for my Dad and posted a mini-comparison of Sony PRS-505 vs. Kindle 2.
- 15th of September: Some rumors have leaked about Time Inc. eReader possible in the future.
- 17th of September: Probably the biggest Kindle news of the month: price drop on refurbished Kindles. $149 for first generation Kindle and $219 for Kindle 2.
- 19th of September: Kindle version of The Lost Symbol is outselling the hardcover on Amazon.
- 22nd of September: Amazon launches AmazonBasics.
- 23rd of September: I’ve posted a summary of what other reviewers are saying on Sony Reader Touch/Pocket vs. Kindle. My own Sony Reader Touch edition is on the way so you can expect a hands on review soon.
- 24th of September: techflash.com posted a great picture that shows all connections and entanglements between different companies related to eBook industry.
- 25th of September: …and this picture becomes outdated on the very next day as Verizon enters the arena as 3G provider for iRex.
- 27th of September: BestBuy will Sell Sony and iRex eReaders. This looks like a serious threat to Amazon that continues to ignore retail channels other than their own website. It really baffles me why are they doing it. I still think that selling Kindles in airports will make a killing.
- 29th of September: inductive charging comes to Kindle. Though it is still not as good as it can be.
- 30th of September: Microsoft unveils their Tablet PC.
I’m pretty sure I noticed one of those deleted options. I have a great collection of all of L. M. Montgomery’s works that was $3.99 (I think). I was looking for it to have my friend buy it and couldn’t find the same one anywhere – all the other options were just partial collections of her work. Not sure why it got cut, but I’m more than a little irritated about it. I guess I just don’t understand the point of cutting content – it’s not like it takes that much effort to keep it cataloged with the amount of stuff in Amazon’s system…