180k Kindle-Only Books Have Topped 100m Downloads

Amazon is riding a crest lately with the announcement of the success of its Prime shipping service and just today, announced that the Kindle store has passed the 100 million download mark for its Kindle-only books. Kindle accomplished this impressive feat in less than a year. Not too shabby.

Amazon is expanding its service to new regions, one being India, where it launched its self-publishing service and its Kindle readers for the first time.

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Speaking of this, a book that had long not been available on the kindle, The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe, finally made it's way to the Kindle recently and I bought it!!

http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Claw-F...346192503&sr=8-1&keywords=book+of+the+new+sun

One of my favorite books since 1994, it's a tetraology written by Gene Wolf, that takes place on a "dying Earth" named Urth. It follows the adventures of a torturer named Severian who gets expelled from the Torturer's Guild for the crime of mercy.

Anyway, point being, I wrote an email to Jeff Bezos about the book and lobbied for him to try to get the publisher to put it on the Kindle, and it took some time, but they finally did it!!

Amazon really does listen to it's customers, and it's no surprise with their easy access, and seamless infrastructure that they make it as good as possible for customers to get their books on their device of choice (in my case, the iPad), and just read what they want.

I'm not surprised to see this success from them. Jeff Bezos knew what he was doing when he made the Kindle an integral part of the Amazon business model and went into the ebooks market. This has been the culmination of several years of hard work by Amazon and Bezos.

I turned my Kindle into essentially a dedicated chess device. It's a Kindle 2, one of the older black and white models. I jailbroke it to install some custom chess software on it so I can analyze games while also reading Kindle chess related books. The little movement button is a pain in the ass though and a touch screen would be so much better (first world problems), but the battery life on the older kindles is fantastic. Haven't recharged it in like 4 weeks and it still works fine. That said though I think a Kindle might best be useful for more novel like books instead of 'study' type books like a chess book, as im finding I like traditional books more for that role along with a real board.

for reading, I really like e-ink displays compared to lcds (my eyes stress easily), before I prefer books over e-books, after having a kindle, its now a 50-50 decision,lol

I've gone kindle only in my house. So much easier to read on my tablet than holding a book, especially when I'm trying to read in the dark

After Amazon's fiasco with 1984 I will not touch e-books.

Is there any way to backup the files off the device yet? Last I heard there was not.

necrosis said:

After Amazon's fiasco with 1984 I will not touch e-books.

Is there any way to backup the files off the device yet? Last I heard there was not.

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You can browse them like a USB flash drive. So yes it's quite easy to backup the files

I don't know if this is good or not, going by those numbers on average a Kindle only book will sell about 500 copies? I know there's sure to be a ton of them who sell very little and some that do actually do well, but from a pure statistical point of view eh.500 copies is hardly a success.

Why do people still read books?

Its an obsolete form of entertainment. Cmon guys, 3D imagery with surround 7.1 DTS is the proper way to tell stories in 2013, get with the program.

I bet 50 Shades of Grey is the top download. Mommy pron for the win

sfsuphysics said:

I don't know if this is good or not, going by those numbers on average a Kindle only book will sell about 500 copies? I know there's sure to be a ton of them who sell very little and some that do actually do well, but from a pure statistical point of view eh.500 copies is hardly a success.

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The overall numbers are large and it's the beginning of a movement that will hopefully put more control (and profit) into the authors' hands, and hopefully remove control from the big publishing outfits.

sfsuphysics said:

I don't know if this is good or not, going by those numbers on average a Kindle only book will sell about 500 copies? I know there's sure to be a ton of them who sell very little and some that do actually do well, but from a pure statistical point of view eh.500 copies is hardly a success.

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Compared to Borders book store that's about 100m more ...