App Store is Cranking Out Ebooks Like There’s No Tomorrow

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

We know there are lots of books in the app store. There is an entire category of apps dedicated to them. But ebooks rarely get any attention in the media because well, they are just books. Boring!

But apparently they are getting the attention of ebook publishers. Mobile analytics Flurry has published a report stating that one out of five new apps approved in September have been an ebook. That is up from just about 10% of the apps approved in July. It has even surpassed games to claim the number 1 spot within the App Store categories. The flurry of ebook apps in the App Store shows that book and content publishers are looking to the growing popularity of smartphones to distribute their content.

However how much of ebooks are actually ever being read. I may be wrong, but I don’t ever remember seeing an ebook app making it to the overall top 50 apps. How many people even choose to read their books on the tiny iPhone screen instead of paper?

Actually, estimates put the iPhone ebook readers at 1 percent of the total book reading population in the US. That may be a good starting number for the publishers. But I wonder how many people actually read books nowadays.

Regardless of the number of people that actually read an book on their iPhone, one thing is for sure. The growing number of book apps is a major reason that the App Store has reached its milestone of available 100,000 apps so quickly. Perhaps the book publishers are just preparing for the inevitable digitization of books with upcoming mobile devices such as the fabled iTablet. Surely transfering their ebook iPhone apps to other digital media devices should be as easy as flipping a page of a real book.

Via Flurry Blog

This is a story by The Apps+Machine