reader.ly

As of Thursday, November 5, the Top 5 books on the Kindle Store Bestsellers List are:

1. By Reason of Insanity, by Randy Singer
2. Fireflies in December by Jennifer Erin Valent
3. A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton
4. Bound for the Holidays (Ties That Bind book 1) by Mackenzie McKade
5. The Hunters by Jason Pinter

I’ve never heard of any of these authors, so I thought I would take a closer look at what’s driving them to the top of the list. They’re free, for starters, as are all but one book in the Top 10 — Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Given the appeal of a freebie, even — or perhaps especially — to people who have shelled out several hundred dollars for a Kindle, it’s not surprising that the most popular books are the ones that are given away. Sean Ryan at SharkJumping lays out the case for a separate Free vs. Paid Kindle Bestseller List, and suggests reasons why publishers would want to give away content.

But what’s the old adage? You can lead a horse to water… Just because a publisher offers something for free doesn’t explain why these particular books made it to the top of the list and into the laps of thousands of Kindle owners. There are 20,000 free books available through the Kindle Store or through Project Gutenberg and other sites that have digitized public domain books. Only 5 of the free classics even make it into the Kindle Top 50: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Pride and Prejudice, The Prince, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and A Christmas Carol.

Of the current Top 5, two are thrillers and two are erotica, making for an unusually high percentage of pulp fiction on the Kindle bestseller list. You can go down any supermarket aisle (or Barnes & Noble, for that matter) and find rows of crime thrillers and mysteries, which also seem to dominate airport bookstores. You don’t typically see erotic fiction dominating book displays, however, at least not in mainstream bookstores. A Kiss of Shadows is about faeries and in the words of Publishers Weekly, “blends supernatural fantasy with detective adventure and hot sex.” Bound for the Holidays is a fantasy of a different sort, about an employee who goes home with the hot CEO after the office holiday party only to find out that his best friend — a cowboy, no less — has shown up and expects to get in on the action as he usually does.

The Kindle does for erotica what the paper bag does for a 40 of O.E.: provide a respectable cover. Kindle owners are free to download anything, regardless of what’s depicted on the cover, and read even the sexiest office romp in, well, the office, with no one the wiser. Although I must warn that if you share a Kindle account with your spouse, as I do, you may get an incriminating email receipt forwarded to you. The Internet, depending on your perspective, has been the best or worst thing to happen to porn since VHS. Given the appeal of anonymity and quantity of free content, the Kindle might do the same for soft core fiction.