Despite Apple’s push to leverage the iPad to conquer the e-reader market, numbers say consumers have other plans. Earlier this week, CEO Steve Jobs trumpeted his iBooks store selling 100 billion ebooks during the service’s first 11 months. Eclipsing that marker is new research indicating music downloads are five times as popular and 15 times as many apps downloaded during the same period.
“The conclusion that can be drawn so far is that apps/songs show an order of magnitude more popularity than ebooks,” said Asymco’s Horace Dediu Friday. It is unclear whether Kindle’s ebooks outsell Amazon’s music downloads because the two companies offer differing delivery methods, with the Seattle-based Internet retailer foregoing an Apple-like integration of ebooks, music and app sales.
However, for fans of the printed word, the research results do offer a sobering conclusion. Despite being available for just a decade, they are already outselling a 400-year-old medium. “The download data shows how quickly new media displaces old,” Dediu notes.
Which makes Jobs’ remarks four years ago to the New York Times worthy of scratched heads. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole concept is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” So why is Apple putting so much emphasis on ereaders and its battle with Amazon’s Kindle?
“Do we have another example of Steve’s classic misdirection where he dismisses a category only to enter and dominate it at some later time? the analyst asks. Maybe. One key to the popularity of ereaders is the lack of physical objects. Like previous surveys which have found few downloaded apps are actually used, e-readers allow hundred of books to be stored, but never read.
[Asymco]
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
21 responses to “Apple May Want You to Buy E-Books, But Consumers Prefer Apps By Big Margin”
If Apple really want to sell a lot more eBooks then they need to do better than just leave the job to the iBookstore. The iBooks App ‘store’ is not a great place for genuinely browsing, finding inspiration, getting excited, it’s just another generic Apple behemoth of a store like iTunes and the App Store and the Mac App Store.
They need to recreate the excitement of a good bookshop – or why not create a stonkingly brilliant Books magazine as an App in itself – one that’s totally linked through to the store, but that has the creative freedom in presentation, layout, and functionality to truly inspire potential readers.
It’s really way too soon to evaluate Apple’s eBook strategy since it hasn’t fully unfolded yet. The EPUB 3 Standard has just emerged, many books and magazines sold by Apple are still contained in apps and the tools to create enhanced ePub-based eBooks are still at an early stage. Also, one has to factor in the greater conservatism of publishers, librarians and even some of the more active readers. Finally, we don’t yet know whether Apple will apply the same thinking to apps that sell books (Kindle, Nook, et. al.) as has been applied to magazine subscriptions.
In my country there are no books to buy in the iBooks app.
All good points.
It’s no wonder its off to a slow start, but there is no reason it won’t pick up.
I think the premise of this article is flawed by a mistaken interpretation of Job’s comment. Yes he said they don’t read… but what he meant (imho) was don’t “read books”. I think in the internet era, many of us read far more than we ever did… but just not Gutenberg style.
So what we are seeing is Jobs attempt to monetize the reading he does see, not him going back on his original assessment. If he was getting into Amazon’s print distribution business, then you would have a point.
The thing is that eBooks are only fun, I mean real fun to read on an iPad. Reading on an iPhone is a pain in the ass. Yes, it’s possible, in particular on an iPhone 4, but…
As there have “only” been sold 15 million iPads, I for one think that 100 million (not billion as the article says) is quite a lot.
Think about how long it takes to “Consume” a book vs. an app or a song. Nobody reads 50 books a week, but there are people downloading 50 apps/week or 50 songs/week.
Think about how long it takes to “Consume” a book vs. an app or a song. Nobody reads 50 books a week, but there are people downloading 50 apps/week or 50 songs/week.
I buy much more at amazon, and read in the Kindle app in my iPad. Problem is catalog, the iBookstore just can’t compete as of today.
100 MMMMMillion
Typo made this article hellish to figure out
Surprise, surprise! Apps have had a huge leg up this entire time though and even though I still buy books online at places like http://www.booklookr.com every now and then I’ll get an ebook through ibooks, but it’s hard to justify some of the prices on there.