Amazon announced on Tuesday that its catalog of over 180,000 Kindle-exclusive books have been purchased, downloaded or borrowed from its lending library more than 100 million times.
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The news comes as Amazon moves closer to its upcoming press event on September 6. Touting this milestone is more indication that the company is likely gearing up to launch its next-generation Kindle e-reader and Kindle Fire tablet devices.
Amazon has provided a growing array of incentives for publishers and self-published authors to sell content exclusively through its store. Reaching 100 million downloads could be a testament of their collective success. KDP Select, a lending program that encourages self-published authors and publishers to make their work available exclusively in the Kindle Store for 90-day periods in exchange for a potential revenue share, is part of that effort. According to Amazon, books enrolled in KDP Select in July earned 77% more royalties from paid sales than the three months before they were enrolled in the program.
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"This figure is conservative and only includes books that were available via KDP for the entire three months prior to enrolling in KDP Select," Amazon said in a statement. "If you include the money that authors earned from the KDP Select fund, their earnings are even higher."
The company said some of its most popular Kindle-exclusive titles include War Brides by Helen Bryan, which has been purchased or borrowed over 270,000 times, and Karen McQuestion’s books A Scattered Life, Easily Amused and The Long Way Home, which have been purchased or borrowed more than 500,000 times.
Meanwhile, A Modern Witch by Debora Geary recently hit number one on the Kindle best-seller list and briefly surpassed Fifty Shades of Grey as its most downloaded e-book.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
