1% of entire US population reading a book on the iPhone
By Paul Biba
That’s what the latest research report by Flurry says. From August 2008 to August 2009, ,ore games were released than any other category. However, in September this seemed to change and in October one in every five new apps was a book. Flurry feels that Apple is positioned to take market share from the Kindle and predict that the iPhone will become a significant contributors in this space.
Nintendo, in its last earnings call, stated that competition from the iPhone was one of the reasons its profits fell by half in the last quarter and Flurry feels that this is some indication of what the iPhone could do to Amazon. Amazon, however, has its own iPhone app and I don’t know, and Flurry doesn’t mention, how this could play into the equation. It could very well be that having the ability to read the same book on both the iPhone and the Kindle could increase, rather than decrease, Amazon’s share. Also, the 1% figure is probably a bit low, since Amazon only has 1 app, but many people are probably using it, like me, to read their Kindle books.
November 6th, 2009 at 10:49 am
The folks at O’Reilly took a look at these numbers recently regarding games and books and did some debunking:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/11/games-top-the-charts-iphone-android-markets.html
It should be noted that each individual book counts as its own app, which is probably why the numbers are tilting that way. It’s kind of like saying that each mp3 for each song counts as an app.