300,000+ iPhone/Touch downloads of eReader books from STORE
2M downloads of ePub books for the iPhone/Touch will have taken place at Feedbooks in the next two weeks or so—that’s my guess based on info earlier this month from Hadrien Gardeur there.
And on the commercial side, Steve Pendergrast, replying to my just-posted question, reports 300,000+ iPhone/Touch downloads in eReader.
Remember, we’re talking about paying customers, not just freebies (both biz models have their place—freebies if nothing else can pave the way for commercial books).
Steve is co-owner of eReader.com and its parent company Fictionwise. His informative comments today:
As of the end of August eReader had been installed on just under a quarter million iPhone/iPod touch devices. Over 300,000 ebooks have been downloaded onto the iPhone/iTouch platforms from our store, and that does not include downloads of free books from places like Manybooks.com (for privacy reasons we don’t track anything about what people do from the app if it does not involve our own stores).
Add in Stanza, bookshelf, and other iphone ebook offerings and it is abundantly clear that many more people are reading on the Apple devices than Kindle. There really is not even a question about it anymore. iPhone/iTouch required only about 90 days to exceed even the stratospheric end of the estimates for Kindle that Amazon themselves said were “extremely high”.
This is not to say that Kindle won’t be an important niche player going forward. Choice is what it’s all about. Consumers who can afford a dedicated stand-alone device have a lot of options now including Kindle, and Kindle may get the lion’s share of those high-end consumers even with the many new e-ink offerings that are launching in the next few quarters.
It’s just that there will always be many times as many consumers who find the iPhone screen “big enough” and can’t justify the extra expense of a stand-alone device. There’s just no overcoming that simple fact.
The real story in 2009 will be iPhone vs. Android. iPhone vs. Kindle is a settled question.
Many thanks, Steve! Your company is private, but maybe you can give us an approximate idea of the expected annual revenue coming in from the iPhone/Touch books, based on the 300K figure over the summer. Even at that level, we’d be talking about a million downloads a year, and we know the iPhone is just getting started. Plus, Android’s ahead! I think there’ll be room for both. Can’t wait to see the inevitable eReader for Android. Keep us posted.
Now over to you, Marc. What are the latest numbers for Stanza? And Hadrien, feel free to join in with more information on your march to the 2M mark!
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:30 am
Those are great numbers! One question: have 300,000 books actually been *purchased* since the release of eReader for the iPhone, or does that number include the downloading of previously-purchased books by existing customers onto the iPhone device? It would be interesting to know the change in the rate of purchases since the eReader app came out.