Amazon is celebrating their ten year anniversary of the Kindle in November, but the Seattle company has already hit a major milestone. The total number of e-books available on the Amazon Kindle have hit the 5 million mark. It depends on what country you access Amazon though. In the United States, Amazon will display 4,947,718 e-books and at the current growth rate there will be 5,000,000 by November. When accessing the .com site from other places such as Germany, the 5 million threshold has already been surpassed. This is primarily due to sheer number of titles submitted by local publishers.
Here are some statistics on how Amazon was able to surpass the 5 million e-book mark in many different countries.
- For the past five years Amazon has experienced a 17% growth rate in the number of e-books submitted to their platform. They primarily stem from Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle Select and from major publishers.
- Every month there are approximately 60,000 to 75,000 English e-books that debut on the Kindle platform.
- The supply of non-fiction books outnumbers literature & fiction by a factor of 1.5, while non-fiction book sales are much lower than fiction.
- The most competitive genres from a supply perspective are Religion & Spirituality with 413,473 English language titles, followed by Romance (339,577) and Children’s eBooks49 million available paperbacks and hardcover books on Amazon worldwide. 315,105. Of course, all these categories break down into more than 80 sub- and sub-sub-genres each. Nevertheless, the numbers give you a feel of how big a mass-market e-books have become. (See this page for the graph of all main genres: http://k-lytics.com/amazon-book-competition/)
- There are 49 million books available in paperback and hardcover on Amazon worldwide.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
