One of the benefits of this challenging year has been the opportunity for many people to get more reading done than usual.
Whether you’re looking to learn or escape from reality for an hour, with so many e-books and audio books now glutting the market, there’s never been a better time to be a reader.
If you’re looking for some entertainment at home, the ability to take a handful of titles on vacation without weighing down your luggage, or to kill the wasted time on your morning commute, investing in a Kindle or a Kobo might be the smartest thing you do this year.
Now, if you’re tempted by the idea of buying your first e-reader, what’s one of the first questions you’ll be asking yourself?
How Many Books Can a Kindle Hold?
Now, before we show you how many books a Kindle can hold, why should you consider buying one?
Maybe you’re a committed fan of physical books and you’re convinced that nothing can rival physically cracking the spine of a book and then leafing through the pages, curled up in a comfy chair. We get that. Indeed, we agree with this sentiment.
Here’s the thing, though. You can consider e-books as a supplement to the real thing rather than a replacement.
Staying at home? Read a book.
Heading on your holidays? Take the e-reader with you along with a full library of books.
When it comes to the number of books you can store on your new Kindle, that will depend on which of the following storage options you select:
- Kindle 8GB
- Kindle 32GB
Kindle 8GB
With the entry-level Kindle in terms of memory offering just 8GB, is that really enough?
The short answer: absolutely!
Of this 8GB, you’ll only be able to use 6GB for storing titles. The remaining memory is required to run the system files on your e-reader.
As usual, Amazon is less than transparent with hard data, only stating that you can store “thousands of titles” on your Kindle. In effect, they’re saying that for most regular readers, storage is more than fit for purpose.
Now, while obviously vague, it is hard to more precise than that ballpark estimate as the size of the files you are storing is instrumental in terms of overall storage space. E-Books and plain text files take up very little room indeed at 2 to 3MB. This is tiny. If you stick with this type of title, you could fit 2000 to 3000 books on a base model Kindle. That’s close to a decade’s worth of reading material, even at the rate of a book a day.
Step things up to graphic novels or image-laden PDFs, though, and you’ll obviously need more space than text files call for.
Audio files for audiobooks take up much more space, but you’ll still have room for 30 or 40 audiobooks on an 8GB Kindle.
How about if this legitimately doesn’t seem like enough for your needs? Maybe you’re studying and getting through a variety of textbooks at an incredible rate. Perhaps you’re retired and powering your way through untold books on the daily. Or, you could be planning a lengthy trip with the need for a great deal of reading material on-demand.
You could consider the 32G Kindle with four times the storage!
Kindle 32GB
As you can see from the snapshot of the 8 gig Kindle, its bigger brother is designed for the committed bookworm with a voracious appetite for literature.
Even allowing for the 5GB partitioned for running system files, you’ll still benefit from a whopping 27 GB of available storage. Remember, unlike with your smart phone, you won’t need space for apps, video files, selfies, and all those other data-heavy elements common to other digital devices.
Bottom line, you can store well over 10,000 e-books on the biggest Kindle, and as many as 150 audiobooks.
Before we round out, a glimpse at some of the content you can treat yourself to on your all-new Kindle.
What Kind of Content Can You Find on Kindle
- eBooks
- Audiobooks
- Graphic novels
- PDFs
e-Books
For most people, regular e-books make up the majority of their Kindle purchases.
Invest in one of this nifty Amazon devices and you can enjoy all your favorite titles in digital form, along with some exclusive titles only available in digital form.
Audiobooks
If you need to multitask and you don’t have enough time to devote to reading, audiobooks plug the gap nicely.
Whether you’re learning a new language, looking to make your morning commute more productive, or to relax towards sleep while someone reads you a story, you’re spoiled for choice for audiobooks on Amazon.
Graphic novels
While you can only view graphic novels in grayscale, you’ll still benefit from losing yourself in an immersive world.
As mentioned above, if you’re wondering how many books can a Kindle hold, you won’t fit as many audiobooks on your device as you could with regular e-books. Still, the 32GB Kindle still has space for perhaps 30 or 40 graphic novels or comic books.
PDFs
If you’re studying or working, you may need to use PDF files.
The drawback here is that you can’t readily adjust the font size, so you’ll need to zoom in and out. This becomes clumsy, so we don’t recommend browsing PDFs on Kindle as standard practice. In an emergency, you’ll find it functional, though.
Remember… You Don’t Need Too Much Storage on Kindle
As a parting shot, remember that you don’t need to keep all the books you have downloaded stored on your Kindle. You’ll enjoy unlimited storage of all the books you have purchased on your Amazon account. Think of your Kindle as a repository rather than your only storage option.
Take a moment to bookmark Pick My Reader before you head off, and we’ll see you soon!
