Most people don't have the time or the interest to dig through the heap to try and find the next The Martian. While there's nothing inherently wrong with self-published books, and success stories like Twilight and The Martian show there are some great books to be found, the lack of any books from popular authors is a problem. A large portion of these are also self-published, but some are likely to be from small publishing houses. That leaves barely 100,000 non-exclusive books it's about 8% of the total. This means they're not available for sale anywhere else in other words, they're all self-published. Of those, almost 1.3 million books are Amazon Exclusives. Right now, there are more than 1.4 million books available on Kindle Unlimited. If you have a favorite author, there's a good chance their work is published by one of these 'Big Five'.
That means no Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, or Simon & Schuster. None of the major publishing houses have made their books available on Kindle Unlimited. And while that figure is accurate, you won't find many bestsellers or popular books on the list. Amazon likes to trumpet that Kindle Unlimited has more than one million books available for subscribers to read.
