English teacher and author, Derek Haines, has kept track of the number of books on Amazon for many years. He writes that it used to be easy to see how many books were on Amazon as the totals were given in search results.
Here are his estimates as of April 2021. We also cite data from blogger, economist, and writer Claude Forthomme.
Number of Kindle books uploaded to Amazon per day
Haines worked out that in just one period of four days, over 30,000 ebooks were added to Kindle. Now, this figure will obviously vary from month to month but this gives us 7,500 new Kindle books per day, giving us a total of over 2,7 million Kindle books per year.
Total number of Kindle books
When he was last able to check actual numbers on Amazon, mid-2018, Haines says there were over 6 million books in the Kindle store. He works with an estimate of about 1 million new ebooks being added to this number every year (which is on the lower end, considering the earlier figures) meaning that by the end of 2021 there will be an estimated 9 million ebooks/ Kindle books.
As early as 2014, writer and economist Claude Forthomme estimated that there were over 1 million books going up onto Kindle every year. She realized that members of the Amazon Associates program could see book totals in search results and used a null search to see the total number of books available.
Total number of books on Amazon
The big question is how many books are there in total on the giant bookselling platform? In another article, from January 2021, Haines says that, using the Forthomme method, he was able to get a figure of 48,6 million books. That was in mid-2018. Using a conservative estimate of 1 million books a year uploaded since then, gives us an estimated total of 52 million books on Amazon by the end of 2021.
