With 48.5 million books available on Amazon, it tells me that they may well be wrong. The traditional publishing industry that was, and in some ways, still is holding onto the belief that their 19th-century business model will work in the 21st century. But Amazon continues to make money from both and makes the running in the publishing market.īut this position of power was handed to Jeff Bezos and Amazon on a silver platter. Major publishers still look down on self-published titles as trash, similar to those 90’s returns. In fact, perhaps little has changed since those early days of Amazon. What the big six publishers had always thought of as trash, Bezos and Amazon slowly turned into a huge goldmine. Instead of hundreds of thousands of books being recycled to make cardboard packaging, he sold them online. It was Jeff Bezos who realized they had some value. Because they had no commercial value, they were destined to be pulped. These were books that had been returned because they were unsold in bookstores. Amazon built its business on the back of selling book returns from the then six major publishers. So, it is the end of the argument.īut it is interesting to remember where and how Amazon started, way back in the nineties. Some see this as a monopoly, which, by many, is the definition of a bad thing. So it can, will, and does control the book publishing market. It also says that no matter what anyone thinks, believes, or tries to deny, Amazon has built a book sales and distribution empire. Or give or take a few ancient papyrus scrolls and stone-carved tablets. Perhaps it includes many out-of-print books. That surely must be somewhere close to every single book in existence. Amazon removed this facility from Amazon Associates a few years ago. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to access the data, as shown in the screenshots above. I found the answer to how many books on Amazon using the same home screen search technique on Amazon Associates and was quite astonished at the number I found. What I was more interested in, though, was how many books in total there were on Amazon. So yes, you could say that 3.4 million was a lot of ebooks.

With the growth in tablets, larger smartphones, and of course, dedicated e-readers, the demand for ebooks is increasing.Īs is the motivation for people to write new books and become published authors in the hope of gaining sales in a new and vibrant market. Nor with his calculation that a new Kindle ebook was published every five minutes. Using the same method at the time, I found that the total had increased by 20,000 only a few days after his post. So it has been a difficult question to answer definitively.īut some time ago, Claude Nougat found a clever way to find the answer to this question using Amazon Associates.Īt the time, there were, in fact, close to 3.4 million ebooks listed on the Kindle Store. With the popularity of ebooks, the question of how many ebooks are available on the Amazon Kindle store has been asked many times.īut Amazon keeps this information about how many ebooks there are on Kindle very close to its chest. Update: Read our newer related article revealing that 30,000 new Kindle ebooks were published on the Amazon Kindle Store in only four days. Number of ebooks in the Kindle Store (Original article)

Amazon books kindle store