how many books are there on amazon kindle?
You are reading: How many books are on amazon
It’s a number I’ve been tracking for a few years. in particular, how many e-books are there in the kindle store.
The first Kindle ebooks appeared on Amazon in 2007. In that year there were 88,000 ebooks available.
every year since then, the number has increased rapidly.
how many books are available on kindle now?
updated October 2020.
It has become a guessing game since 2018. Before that, it was possible to accurately track the number of new Kindle eBooks published each year.
but it seems that amazon cut off all avenues to obtain this data in mid-2018. however, according to the best estimates, about a million new ebooks are published in amazon’s kindle store each year.
You can see the year over year growth in the number of books on Kindle in the chart below.
As you can see, until 2018, I was able to verify the numbers. Since then, I can only estimate the total number of e-books published each year.
I have updated this article many times over the years. you can continue reading the content of the original article, which includes notes and references that I used to keep track of developments.
number of e-books in the kindle store (original article)
Update: Read our most recent related article revealing that 30,000 new kindle ebooks were released on amazon’s kindle store in just four days.
With the popularity of e-books, the question of how many e-books are available on the amazon kindle store has been asked many times.
but amazon keeps this information about how many ebooks are on kindle very close to your chest. so it has been a difficult question to answer definitively.
but some time ago, claude nougat found an ingenious way to find the answer to this question using amazon associates.
You can read about it in his blog post. at that time, there were, in fact, about 3.4 million e-books listed on the kindle store.
Using the same method at the time, I found that the total had increased by 20,000 just a few days after it was published.
I wasn’t surprised by the number. nor with his calculation that a new kindle ebook was published every five minutes.
With the growth of tablets, larger smartphones, and of course dedicated e-readers, the demand for e-books is increasing.
as is the motivation for people to write new books and become published authors in hopes of getting sales in a new and vibrant market.
so yes, you could say that 3.4 million was a lot of e-books.
however, what interested me most was how many books there were in total on amazon.
I found the answer to how many books on amazon using the same search technique on the home screen at amazon associates and was quite surprised at how many I found.
Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to access the data, as shown in the screenshots above. amazon removed this feature from amazon associates a few years ago.
48.5 million books on amazon
which must surely be somewhere near all the books in existence. maybe include many out of print books.
or give or take a few ancient papyrus scrolls and stone-carved tablets.
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also says that no matter what you think, believe or try to deny, amazon has created an empire of selling and distributing books. for what it can, will and will control the book publishing market.
Some see this as a monopoly, which, for many, is the definition of a bad thing. maybe so, but it’s a fact of life now. So, that’s the end of the discussion.
but it’s interesting to remember where and how amazon started, back in the nineties. amazon was created by selling book returns from the top six publishers at the time.
These were books that had been returned because they had not been sold in bookstores. since they had no commercial value, they were destined to be pulped.
It was Jeff Bezos who realized they had some value. Instead of recycling hundreds of thousands of books to make cardboard packaging, he sold them online.
it all started with the return of books
what the big six publishers had always considered rubbish, bezos and amazon slowly became a huge gold mine.
in fact, perhaps little has changed since those early days of amazon.
Major publishers still dismiss self-published titles as crap, similar to ’90s comebacks. But Amazon continues to make money from both and holds its own in the publishing market.
yes, maybe amazon has a monopoly.
but this position of power was handed to jeff bezos and amazon on a silver platter.
the traditional publishing industry that was, and somehow still clings to the belief that its 19th century business model will work in the 21st century.
with 48.5 million books available on amazon, it tells me they may very well be wrong.
however, it hardly matters. It’s clear that from the largest traditional publisher, to the latest self-published first-time Kindle eBook author, everyone needs Amazon to sell their books.
The only noteworthy statistic in all of this is that there are only 3.4 million e-books in the kindle store. That’s less than 10% of all the titles that Amazon has on its shelves. Clearly, the market for e-books and desktop publishing is still very young.
With the popularity of kindle devices, kindle apps, free kindle ebooks, kindle unlimited, prime reading, kindle singles, free reading apps, and a growing number of amazon prime members, the only way to follow is for amazon with ebooks.
despite fewer people buying a kindle today, phone and tablet reading is on the rise for customers with an amazon account. so sales of kindle ebooks continue to grow.
notes and updates
Update Notes: As you can see by reading the above article, it was first published quite some time ago.
but it’s still relevant to understanding how amazon and the kindle store have become so ubiquitous in the book market, from new york times bestsellers to one-time independent self-publishers.
the innovation of combining audio series and kindle e-books is likely to be another winning move.
Amazon has created a walled garden of e-books.
when you buy a kindle or fire tablet, your only option is to buy ebooks from amazon or access deals on kindle books. By refusing to use the industry standard .epub eBook file format, Amazon can control its marketplace.
another interesting observation is that amazon decided to close access to data on the total number of e-books in the kindle store.
It’s hard to understand the reasoning behind the move, unless Amazon is embarrassed by the ever-increasing number. but now it is impossible to use the technique explained earlier in the article.
kindle e-book estimate
There was another way to get a quote.
for some time, wikipedia had an entry with a link to the number of e-books in the kindle store.
Last time I could check, it said there were 6 million e-books in early 2018.
Hearsay estimates that a new kindle book is released every few minutes seem completely unrealistic and even on the positive side of the ledger.
Between 2014 and 2018, the total grew from 3 million to 6 million. this means that 750,000 kindle ebooks were published each year between the two dates. this equates to a new e-book entering the kindle store every minute and forty-two seconds.
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that’s certainly a lot of e-books.
To put things in perspective, though, there’s still a long way to go before e-books match the number of books Amazon has available for sale.
sadly, amazon removed access to this data for wikipedia in early 2019.
2022 update and new methodology
Thanks to ebookfriendly research, there is a way to estimate the number of ebooks available in the kindle store.
When I say an estimate, I mean just that, and results may vary. however, in my tests, the method appears to return reasonably accurate data.
the logic behind this method is that google search indexes all kindle ebooks.
if you search for an asin number, it will always return the correct ebook.
so if google indexes all kindle ebooks, it’s just a matter of figuring out how many there are.
It’s relatively easy to do this by using search strings that are unique to Kindle eBooks.
a simple example is format: kindle edition. this appears on every kindle ebook page below the title and next to the author’s name.
but you need more unique expressions to make the search more precise.
the easiest way to find them is to look at the product details of an e-book.
To create my search strings, I used different combinations of featured list items that are unique to kindle ebooks.
site:amazon.com “format: kindle edition” “file size :” “word :” “loan :” “print length :”
site:amazon.com “format: kindle edition” “word of wisdom:” “loan:” “print length:”
site:amazon.com “format: kindle edition” “file size :” “word :” “loan :” “print length :” “text to speech :”
google search results for kindle ebooks
I entered the above search strings into google search.
here are the results of each.
As the last search string contains the most elements, I think it’s probably the most accurate.
I repeated these searches many times, including incognito searches, and the results were consistent.
You can copy and paste the above scripts to try it out for yourself. but you may see variations depending on your location and browser settings.
updated kindle ebook progression chart for 2022
As you can see, I’ve been tracking this data for a long time and I’m not surprised the progression continues.
Because it’s so easy to self-publish an eBook on Amazon, the numbers will continue to rise each year.
only amazon knows the real number.
but I’m pretty sure the method I’m using now is accurate enough to provide a reasonable estimate.
Related Reading: Update: There are now over 12 million eBooks in the Kindle Store, and the number is growing rapidly every day.
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