The OF Blog: I seem to be amassing a largish e-book collection over the past 16 months

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

I seem to be amassing a largish e-book collection over the past 16 months

Before I finally upgraded to an iPhone 4 back in early April 2011, I had only the Kindle for Mac e-reader software.  I may have had 2-3 e-books (all free public domain works) on it, but I didn't really use it because paper books were much more portable.  But after I bought that phone, I started using the iBooks, Kindle for iPhone, and Nook software and I bought some e-books (and downloaded many more free ones).  This only intensified once I bought an iPad 2 in July 2011.  Since I was bored last night, I thought I'd do a quick count of the e-books that I have by software.  Surprised by the number I had accumulated over the interim, with something like 2/3 of them read:

iBooks – 223 e-books
Kindle for iPhone/iPad/Mac – 191 e-books
Nook for iPhone/iPad – 9 e-books
Google Play – 11 e-books (all public domain)
Kobo – 3 e-books (all public domain)
Bluefire Reader – 3 e-books (2 Filipino, 1 Portuguese bought)
Elefant (Romanian) – 3 e-books
Classic Books – 3 e-books (all public domain)
Stanza – 7 e-books (all public domain)

Total – 453 e-books

More and more, I've been favoring Apple's native iBooks e-reader, as the screen is brighter and its pagination system (which includes the remaining e-pages in chapters) makes for a more enjoyable e-reading experience.

Now I haven't done a count of my paper books for a couple of years now, but with all of the recent purges and boxing up, I would guess that I probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1700-1800 print volumes, with dozens arriving and leaving each month.  I suspect that in the coming years, the print and e-book numbers will achieve a rough balance, as it is sometimes convenient to read a pre-1923 e-book on the iPad's screen for $0.00 paid and there have been quite a few of these public domain e-books (many, but not all, from Project Gutenberg) added to the reading e-queue for the next few months.

What about you?  If you read e-books, do you have a rough idea about how many you have on your e-reader(s)?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I've got a dedicated e-reader in my Sony (purchased before the Kindle was available in Canada), which has a handy count on the main screen . . . 732 e-books.

At a guess, I'd have to say my sources are evenly split between Amazon, Kobo, and BooksOnBoard.

Hélène said...

293 on the Kindle, mostly from Amazon and a few from public domain. I do try to favor ebooks nowadays because there are nearly 60 meters of paper books in the house and that's enough!
Unfortunately, French publishers are very protective of their profits, which means very high prices, even when there is a MMPP edition. So my ebooks are mostly English books and non fiction French books in most cases remain paper books.

Sarah Bible said...

My stats are not as impressive but I have 13 ebooks waiting on the computer to be added to my Sony reader. Currently there are 106 ebooks on the reader. And I have the Kindle app on my phone with 10 books stored in the Kindle library. Nearly all of the ebooks are public domain titles I got from Project Gutenberg and elsewhere (when offered for free) and I've only bought 4 ebooks within the 2 years I've had my reader.

 
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