Books Fail to Crack Top 100 in iTunes App Store

Mac Slocum
August 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Over at Radar, Ben Lorica analyzes sales and category data for the iTunes App Store and makes an interesting discovery about the store's book section:

The Book category is comprised mostly of ebooks and while there are over 150 such "apps", it was the only category not represented in the Top 100 rankings ...

As Ben notes, most of the applications in the App Store's book category are individual ebooks -- most drawn from Project Gutenberg -- wrapped up as stand-alone software packages. The user reviews attached to these ebook apps fall into two camps: critics who cry foul over public domain titles repurposed with a price tag, and advocates who see value in the applications' low cost (most are $0.99) and easy access.

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1 Comments

Michael Zapp said:
August 15, 2008 8:52 PM

As I noted in that article, I don't think comparing books to Games and the like is a useful exercise -- we never imagined that we (the non-Gutenberg books) would compete against any of the standard (read popular) apps.

It's more interesting to see how the iPhone is doing compared to other eBook vehicles. We only have preliminary data but at least one author is seeing much better sales with the App Store as compared to the Kindle. We hope to see that trend continue.

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