It’s time to publish previous month stats and summaries again.
Kindle book count had several ups and downs during the month of August, finally settling at 349,610 (just 390 books shy of 350K) for an overall increase of 13,713 that translates to 442 books per day on average. This is 3 times lower than previous month gain, in fact this is the slowest growth I’ve observed since I’ve started counting Kindle books this year. I hope Amazon will pick up it’s pace or my book count predictions might be off. If I were to speculate, I would guess that Amazon is periodically prunning self-published books to avoid incidents similar to the one with Orwell books.
Kindle blogs, on the other hand, saw a healthy increase of 807 (almost twice as many as in July) ending at 7,171. This is 26 new blogs per day on average. Although if you look at the chart you can see that majority of the blogs were added on the 12th. If I were to speculate again I would guess that Amazon was holding off on approving blogs until they’ve internally decided on some kind of policy. Either that ot they’ve struck some kind of wholesale deal with some blog mogul.
And now a brief recoup of August 2009 Kindle news:
- August 2nd: Deletion of Orwell books lead to a lawsuit.
- August 3rd: Barnes and Noble made their eReader software available for download.
- August 5th: New Sony eReaders were announced.
- August 7th: After being sold out for nearly a month, Kindle DX is back in stock.
- August 8th: Rupert Murdoch, being dissatisfied with publishing deal with Amazon threatened to pull WJS and The Times from Kindle.
- August 9th: A poll I conducted showed that many Kindle users are interested in Kindle downloader application. However I’m still waiting for final OK from Amazon on this matter.
- August 13th: New iRex eReader was announced.
- August 21st: Some interesting data about Kindle-related carbon emmissions and lack thereof.
- August 22nd: eBook Text Formatter is published. It makes downloading books from web-sites such as lib.ru easier. It also works with Sony PRS eReaders.
- August 27th: Someone was able to mod Kindle to replace CDMA modem with GSM so it can be used in Europe. However software mod needed to make this happen is still in the works.
- August 28th: iRex Barnes and Noble integration announced.
- August 30th: Asus announced plans to release it’s own Asus eReader.
There have been widespread reports that Amazon is deleting kindle editions of public domain and Project Gutenberg texts – this might also explain the drops.
The kindle is just a superb opportunity to move in the direction of green devices, hopefully we will see the paper less revolution in our life time!
not going to happen until you have so many digital pages around that you can have several showing different things at the same time, all networked togeather so they can be showing different pages of the same document.
e-readers may reduce the amount of paper (mostly by reducing the number of books printed), but don’t ever plan on paper going away. I don’t expect them to make much difference to the amount of paper businesses go through.
Is this number of books real?
So far I purchased 3 books for my Kindle DX, and the three of them were of very poor quality, could not qualify as a proper edition of the books. I fear there are many books like this, and so that Amazon may be overestimating the amount of titles available for the Kindle.
The books I purchased were Parasite Rex – Carl Zimmer, and Life Ascending – Nick Lane, and Schaum’s Easy Outline Calculus.
The first two had the illustrations completely missing. The text referred to the illustrations, in the “Look Inside” feature on the site you can see illustrations, one even had an illustrations index at the end, but no illustrations to be seen.
Parasite Rex also had serious editing errors – letters missing, dots instead of etters, incorrect capitalized letters, etc..
Life Ascending had several references to footnotes, but no footnotes to be seen.
Caculus Easy Outline had the illustrations but they were useless or impractical. The Easy Outline Series are books that compile lots of info in few space, and they are excellent at that. In the kindle edition, there are very large blank spaces before and after the figures, and 1 page in the printed book could easily take 2-3 pages in the Kindle DX – And the DX’s screen is larger than the book itself!! Also, some formulas where included as graphics in the book, and where unreadable – very very low definition and low contrast.
In summary, I had to return the books. If Amazon had not returned me the money, I would have felt stolen. Nowhere in the site they inform that the Kindle Edition does not include illustrations which are critical to the book. Isn’t this an advertising lie?
I am including this comment here, because I fell that Amazon, in the rush to include titles, is including titles that a consumer protection organization would not qualify as such. And also, I am afraid that in the rush to minimize delivery costs, they are either deleting illustrations or including very low res graphics that turn the books unreadable.
Am I the only one having this problem?
Thanks!!