The iBookstore six months after launch: One big failureIt's been over six months since the release of the iPad on April 3rd, and the simultaneous launch of iBooks and the iBookstore, which promised to give Amazon's Kindle and Kindle Store a run for its money. I figured that this would be a good time to see just how the iBookstore has progressed. The answer, in a word: poorly ... very poorly.
The Kindle store currently advertises that they have over 700,000 books, magazines, and blogs available for download. Apple hasn't released statistics on the number of currently available books, so an accurate comparison isn't easy to make, but it's a safe bet to say that once you eliminate the ability to load .pdf files, the availability of e-books from the iBookstore pales. At launch, it was reported that the iBookstore contained somewhere between 46,000 and 60,000 titles, 30,000 of which came from the Project Gutenberg library of free out-of-copyright books. However, since these are also available on the Kindle, we can reduce both sides of the equation by 30,000. This brings the number of titles at launch for the iBook to a generous 30,000. That's a big difference, but outside of raw numbers, there are many factors constraining a massive increase in iBookstore sales.Continue reading The iBookstore six months after launch: One big failureThe iBookstore six months after launch: One big failure originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Oct 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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