According to an article on Techrunch today, Kindle is making mincemeat of iBooks. One report, admittedly only a rumour, is that Amazon is selling sixty books to Apple's one. It certainly isn't surprising that Kindle is doing better, but it is the scale of the difference that is amazing – assuming this rumour is anywhere near the truth.
On a number of occasions I've compared the two bookstores and the "eco-system" of using both formats. I like the iBooks user interface and I would love the iBookStore to succeed. But from experience I can find more of what I want on Amazon and, while I haven't made back-to-back comparisons, I believe independent reports which say the Kindle Store is cheaper. In marketing terms, though, Amazon benefits from a wide range of applications that can handle purchased books – from the Kindle reader itself through Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android. That's a vast potential market. In contrast, Apple's iBookStore is a closed group restricted to iOS devices. Most buyers are probably thinking that they'd prefer to stock their libraries with books they can read in the future on any device they might own.
It will be very interesting to see statistics from the iBookStore. Apple have always been forthcoming on apps sales figures and have produced some stunners. So far, though, there has been silence on book sales (unless I've missed something) and this isn't too encouraging. I wonder if the iBookStore could be Apple's first damp squib of recent years? I hope not, if only because strong competition for Amazon must be a good thing.
Apple touts the fact that it has a solid advantage by controlling both the hardware and software. Although this is true, what they don’t control is the content itself. The iTunes Store is their attempt to at least control the distribution of content. The iPad is their attempt at doing print media better than old tech. Now they want to take on television. As with music, their best bet is to deliver TV ‘better’ than the old media. Their best bet is to offer only what the user wants, in an easy way and totally portable.
This I find very interesting, a battle between two more or less closed systems is intriguing.I would be very interested to see how the figures for Amazon’s eBook sales, Apple’s eBook sales and the eBook sales to owners of eReaders that are not tied to a particular seller of eBooks compare.I know this is an impossible dream, as there are so many of the non-affiliated sellers of eBooks out there in the world, in dozens of languages that to get hold of meaningful figures won’t happen.But it is worth giving a thought to how many eBooks, owners of all those Chinese eReaders, Eastern European eReaders, Asian eReaders, Australian eReaders and so on, none of whom are tied to a particular online eBook store are buying every day.I suspect the numbers will be astronomical.This is almost never discussed, except in very general terms, sort of in passing… It is almost as if the world only has the two eBook sellers…. and the rest, Books on Board et.al are not there.Just a thought in passing…………….