During 2008 the EPUB eBook format gained huge acceptance and we heard rumours touting that there would be 20,000 available EPUB titles by the end of the year. Waterstones were saying this prior to the release of the Sony Reader in the UK.
As we head into 2009, Waterstones still shows less than 7000 titles in their catalogue, when viewing all available eBook titles. However, I get the feeling that this will change quite soon.
A few days back BooksOnBoard made an announcement on WebWire that they now have 30,000 titles available for the iPhone. After doing a search on their site I found that almost 20,000 of those are in the EPUB format. Great news for ePub fans, but we need more. Still, BooksOnBoard was the first retailer to make commercial ePub formatted books available and their entire online eBook collection consists of almost 300,000 titles. Perhaps they will be the first to reach 100,000 ePub books!
No doubt other online retailers such as Waterstones will be soon following suit – will 2009 be the year of the EPUB format?
I note you still have trouble counting. Actually, if you read the PR, you’ll note that BooksonBoard is just accessing Fictionwise’s Ereader store through the Stanza interface, and that the vast majority of titles are in fact secure Ereader books.
You could probably tell this from the sentence in the PR:
Titles must be in the eReader eBook format and include, among 30,000+ others, titles by Gena Showalter, Nora Roberts, Michael Connelly, David Baldacci, Stieg Larsson, Susan Mallery, and Harlequin’s One Click Buy January Blaze Bundle.
Of course, nothing has done so much for epub as the strategy of over-promise, under-deliver, so maybe bald-face lies are the way to go…
…and Waterstones just have access to their books via a distributor…
Anyhow munsey, I went back to BooksOnBoard and made another search, carefully checking that the only options I selected were Adobe ePub and Adobe ePub (DRM).
Well…either I made a mistake on my first try or there was an error on the site – this time the total came to 4764.
A shame for sure!
I’ve now updated the epubbooks.com homepage to reflect this new value.