During the Digital Lunch seminar at this years Frankfurt Book Fair, Michael Vantusko from Overdrive commented that W.H.Smith was one of their eBook customers. As I was updating the epubbooks.com homepage I thought I’d check them out to see if they actually have them online yet. I don’t know the date W.H.Smith went live with their ePub books but they currently have almost 6,500 ePub titles.
As Overdrive also distribute to Waterstones I would imagine that the W.H.Smith eBook collection will grow quite quickly. It’s great to see more stores offering ePub formatted books to the consumers – perhaps this extra competition will result in lower eBook prices sooner rather than later.
There is however quite some way to go before the number of ePub titles reaches the overall eBook numbers. Here’s a quick breakdown of the current eBook titles in the W.H.Smith eBook store;
56056 - PDF
15368 - MobiPocket
6441 - ePub
I also found it interesting that they’re offering eBooks in languages other than just English. Here’s a breakdown of those in the ePub format, which I will follow up with total eBooks in any particular language.
5863 - English ePub Books
509 - French
50 - German
9 - Spanish
6 - Italian
2 - Swedish
1 - Finnish
1 - Norwegian
A selection of different languages in all eBook formats found on the website;
60586 - English (All eBook Formats)
946 - Spanish eBooks
885 - Japanese eBooks
801 - French eBook
424 - Italian eBooks
390 - German eBooks
35 - Dutch eBooks
26 - Russian eBooks
19 - Chinese eBooks
14 - Portuguese eBooks