Today it seems that Amazon has removed the ‘Movers and Shakers’ section from the Kindle Store Bestsellers lists. Its a strange decision because it’s already hard enough to find good, new books in the Kindle Store.
The Hot, New Releases section is full of books that aren’t very new. After coding the bestseller lists feature at bookmonk I’ve realized that the search problem is a HUGE one.
If you look at -
- The fact that 12 of the Top 25 bestsellers are currently free books (6 public domain and 6 new, free releases).
- The only way left to get highlighted is to become a bestseller or for Amazon to agree to let you do a free offer.
- The fact that we are getting overwhelmed by people uploading formatted versions of public domain books (9+ copies of Pride and Prejudice).
It seems awfully difficult for a talented author to break through without a big marketing budget or the backing of Amazon.
Here, in no particular order, are various issues that Amazon ought to look at -
The Public Domain Books Issue
First you have the free public domain books uploaded by Amazon. Then you have mobilereference and other companies that upload their versions of public domain books. Then you have publishers uploading their ‘classic editions’.
For every public domain book you are getting multiple copies priced all the way from zero to $4-$5.
That’s a lot of books and a lot of noise – its the equivalent of 7 different versions of a book taking over half of a bookshelf at a bookstore.
The Amazon Approved Free Book Offers
There are two categories of book offers here -
- Free Book offers that last a month or more like Robin Hobb and Naomi Novik. These are perfectly legit, although putting them in the same category as books people pay money for is unfair.
- Book Offers that seem to last a few days or a week or so. Then they get changed to a non-zero price and sell because they have a good sales rank and people assume they must be good. In the recent past, Dead Man’s Rain and Deception have both pulled off this trick.
In my opinion it’s unfair to let a book do a 3 day or 1 week free offer to get sales rank.
Clubbing Public Domain Versions, Free Books, Public Domain Books along with Normal Books
Currently, only 1 out of the top 5 books is a non-free book. Take ‘The Neighbour’ by Lisa Gardner which is at #9. If you exclude free books it should be at #3.
How can you claim that ‘Paranoia’, which is free, is a bestseller and deserves a higher ranking than ‘The Neighbour’?
Its about time Amazon separated out the kindle books bestsellers list into -
- Bestsellers (limited to books over $3).
- Bestselling Books under $3.
- Excluded Public Domain conversions.
Ideally, it would take all the books which aren’t really bestsellers and separate them out into different lists -
- Popular Free Books.
- Popular Public Domain Books.
- Bestselling Independent Books (which seems to be almost an insurmountable problem).
- Bestselling Public Domain Conversions.
What’s the Solution? How do we make the Kindle Store more searchable?
To be fair to Amazon this would be a huge issue for anyone to tackle. We are seeing it everywhere – information overload and bewildering choice.
The key point at which to tackle this is when allowing uploads of books. Amazon has to be tougher on what it lets in, and has to categorize books very, very well at the time of inclusion.
Its really important to differentiate between -
- Publishers and Authors selling books.
- Free and Cheap Books using low prices to get free publicity.
- Free Public Domain Works.
- People trying to make a quick buck off of formatting public domain books.
- Independent Authors, or perhaps they get clubbed into books trying to get publicity via cheaper prices.
Its important because currently good, deserving books (published and independent) are getting drowned out. It might seem really impressive to say there are 300K books available – However, the benefit to the Kindle Store of the 8th formatted variant of Pride and Prejudice (selling at $2.37) is not just low, it’s negative.
Filed under: kindle Tagged: | kindle search, kindle store
Thanks for the article — I agree that the bestseller list should be configurable to filter out the public domain books. I have no problem with those books at all, but I got a page full of Jane Austen when I tried bookmonk.
A similar problem exists with the Recommendations function, which has already become useless for me at this point. I had downloaded Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” at some point, and now my Recommendations are full of every available Twain / Conan Doyle / “World’s Greatest Books” title, not to mention everything that has been offered for free before (“Red Mars” / “Persuader”, etc. — none of which have anything to do with Twain).
Of course you can tweak the recommendations so that Amazon won’t use particular titles. (You get better results with “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”, but now “Serial” and “Pride and Prejudice” and “Sherlock Holmes” seem to pop up every time — especially with “What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?”)
agree that it’s overcrowded. lack of quality control by amazon.
the jane austen overabundance is why I’ve added all the options like price limits, and rating by review, and rating by sales. It takes a little playing around – however you can get what you want.
you can also specify -jane in the search keywords field to exclude particular authors or -public to exclude pulic domain (however, it won’t exclude conversions).