It took Amazon 96 days to grow the list of ebooks in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to include over 100,000 titles. As of this writing, there are now 100,002 ebook titles in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.
When they started the program way back when on November 3, 2011, there were just a little over 5,000 ebooks in it. So they have added almost 1,000 titles per day. That is absolutely amazing.
By comparison, here are the number of ebook titles at some popular public libraries. The New York Public Library has 23,767 ebooks titles. The Los Angeles Public Library has 11,869 ebooks available through OverDrive in Kindle format. The Boston Public Library has 8,104 ebook titles. The Seattle Public Library (close to Amazon headquarters) has 34,463 ebook titles available.
Amazon launched a program called KDP Select on December 8, 2011 that added independent and self-published ebooks to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Self-published authors have been adding their ebooks through KDP Select like crazy since the program launched. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library has a large number of self-published ebooks but it also has many current and former New York Times Bestsellers as well. The Hunger Games series from Suzanne Collins have been the most popular ebooks in the program since it launched.
Authors that loan out their ebooks through KDP Select have been rewarded very well by Amazon. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library loaned out over 295,000 ebooks in just three weeks during December of 2011. Participating authors saw their royalties increase over 400 percent from the previous month. Surprisingly, authors also saw sales of their ebooks increase if they loaned them out for free through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.
Anyone that subscribes to Amazon Prime for $79 per year and owns a Kindle can borrow one ebook per month for free from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Analysts estimate that Amazon sold over 5 million Kindle Fire tablets and several million Kindle ereaders last quarter. So it’s safe to assume that the Amazon Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is only going to get more popular in the coming months.