Are you (like me) impressed by Barnes and Noble’s million plus ebooks? Perhaps we shouldn’t be.
Here are the number of ebooks currently present in the various Barnes & Noble ebook sections -
Fiction
- Christian Fiction - 377.
- Classics – 1,447.
- Erotica – 225.
- Historical Fiction – 1,475.
- Horror – 486.
- Romance – 5,022.
- Science Fiction and Fantasy – 2,839.
- Teen Fiction – 1,958.
- Thrillers, Mystery, and Crime - 2,687 + 3,191 =5,878.
- Westerns – 443.
Totals to 20,150 ebooks.
Non-Fiction
- Biography – 4,328.
- Business and Personal Finances – 1,523.
- Christianity – 1,217.
- Cookbooks – 409.
- Diet & Health – 770.
- History – 3,631.
- Military History – 1,046.
- New Age & Inspiration – 296.
- Parenting & Family - 785.
- Politics & Current Affairs – 2,276.
- Reference – 1,434.
- Religion – 1,775.
- Self-Help – 1,381.
- Sex & Relationships – 211.
- Science & Nature – 788.
- Social Sciences – 2,806.
- Sports – 697.
- Travel – 594.
- True Crime – 312.
Totals to 26,279 ebooks.
Teens & Kids
1,958 ebooks.
That totals to 48,387 ebook titles.
Wait a Minute …
What happened to the million plus eBooks Barnes & Noble had?
On the Nook pages Barnes & Noble clearly claim -
- A million plus ebooks.
- 500K+ free books from Google.
That’s a little bit more than the current 48,387 ebooks they have in their eBook Store.
Well, there are two possibilities -
- B&N are magically going to increase the number of new titles they have available from 48,387 to 548,387. They will then add-on 501,000 free Google Books. All this happens in the next 5 weeks.
- B&N will double available titles from 48,387 to 96,774 ebooks. They will then add-on 910,000 free Google Books to get to a million plus ebooks.
If it’s the former then B&N’s claim is valid. I’ll retract this post and give them kudos for increasing their available new ebook titles by 11 times in 5 weeks.
You have to suspect though that it’s the latter. That B&N are using a clever play on words to make it seem as if they have a lot of range.
Perhaps this is how they intended to write it -
A million plus ebooks. 910,000 of which are public domain books from Google. 500K+ free books from Google. 910,000 to be precise.
In 5 weeks we’ll see whether B&N were being rather liberal with their use of language or they really did intend to have 500K+ new titles available as ebooks.
What could ever make us suspect that Barnes and Noble would oversell a feature?
Well, consider this write-up on Barnes & Noble’s LendMe feature to share books -
Share favorite eBooks with your friends, family, or book club.
Most eBooks can be lent for up to 14 days at a time. Just choose the book you want to share, then send it to your friend’s reader, cell phone, or computer.
Here are the two * items that are missing -
- You can lend an ebook only once. Perhaps ‘share with friends, family or book club’ isn’t the best way to explain that.
- Publishers get to decide whether the feature is enabled for their books.
Another Example: In their comparison chart they list AT&T as the nation’s fastest 3G network. Guess that’s why millions of iPhone owners hate AT&T – it’s just too fast and reliable for their liking.
It isn’t anything new – everyone (including Sony and Cool-er) have been selling their OS slots to Google for the free public domain books Google have scanned from libraries. They are then claiming to have the largest range of ebooks. Why would we expect B&N to be forthright.
Filed under: Reality | Tagged: lack thereof, million ebooks
“You can lend an ebook only once.”
I understood this to mean can lend an e-book to a friend only once, then the book becomes unavailable to you for 2 weeks at which time it can be lent to another friend but not to the first one again. Where is the wording that says a book can be lent only once?
A customer rep. at B&N’s site said it’s only once. There’s a discussion on it at MobileRead.
Nice detective work. I wondered about that claim myself, but I’m glad I left the counting to you!
I’m not saying this’ll get them anywhere near an extra million titles in 5 weeks, but B&N do have a few thousand Smashwords titles due to become available in the next couple of weeks. Maybe they’ve got some more deals like that set up?
[...] and Kindle wins for 25% to 40% of the remaining books. As far as range, B&N currently have 50K Nook ebooks available. If and when their 500K+ new ebooks claim materializes Amazon will have something big to worry [...]