What’s hot on iPhone? Books, books, books!
By Marjorie Kehe | 11.02.09
It’s up to you, of course: You can use your iPhone to hone your Skee-Ball skills or you can re-read “Persuasion”. But don’t assume that iPhones are mostly about games. Last month one out of every five new iPhone and iPod touch applications launched in Apple’s App Store were book-related. 
In fact, book applications for iPhone exceeded the popularity of games apps in the last four months, according to a report by market research firm Flurry. (Meanwhile, Flurry says, games slipped to about 13 percent of new iPhone applications released last month, down from 117 percent in July 2009.)
The report goes on to say that reading books on iPhones is becoming so popular that Amazon, maker of the Kindle, may need to watch its back. According to the folks at Flurry, the iPhone is quickly gaining ground as the e-book reader of choice for many and could steal market share from Amazon’s Kindle.
Amazon has yet to release sales figures for its Kindle, but it’s been estimated that about 3 million of the e-readers will be sold in the US in 2009. According to Flurry, in August, 1 percent of the entire US population (about 300 million) was reading a book on the iPhone.
Whether you prefer the big screen (the Kindle’s is about 6 inches) or the small (you know what an iPhone looks like), that’s a lot of readers already opting for e-books.
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor’s book editor. You can follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/MarjorieKehe.
Comments
2. policywank | 11.02.09
I do most of my reading these days on the kindle app for iphone. Amazon may not get the hardware sales from that, but they get a lot of $9.99 book purchases. I do also have the B&N reader app, but haven’t purchased any books for it yet. I use GoodReader for some of the large PDFs I’ve purchased. Prior to purchasing my iphone, almost all of my book buying for the last 15 years has been from used book stores. The iphone has definitely put me back in the category of people who generate revenue for publishers again.
3. Tam | 11.02.09
I bought the kindle for iPhone to test it out. It works great for me and the bonus is I have a book whenever I want it. I can read between appointments and get the books read that I have been trying to read, instead of reading fluff articles in magazines. I like the way you can get a book that you want (maybe you read a review or heard about it on line) instantly. Too many times I might loose the name of the book I heard about or not get around to ordering the hard copy. I may order a full size kindle next, or I might get a laptop that can run a reader.
4. Paul | 11.02.09
I think people are under the impression that “small screen” implies “small type”. As though they’re thinking of television sets, where the smaller the screen, the smaller everything on the screen. With e-reading technology, though, your text can be as large as you want. It’s just the amount of text you see at once that changes.
I *love* the Kindle for iPhone app. I don’t have to take my current book with me everywhere I go anymore. And I don’t have to carry two books with me when I think I might finish the current book before I get back home to pick up the next one. Other than the mild annoyance of not being able to read for the first and last 15-20 minutes of an airplane ride, it’s wonderful.
5. David Coryer | 11.02.09
Good article. While Amazon might be mindful to keep an eye on the iphone, I find that the Kindle for iphone application is an excellent book application. Amazon might end up winning along with iphone.
6. Ken W | 11.02.09
Amazon will sue Apple and then apple will cave and block you from reading.
Then amazon will burn all the books and force you to buy mein khamp on a Kindle.
7. Mark Sigal | 11.02.09
I am well into my second book using the Kindle reader for iPhone (on my iPod Touch). It’s a great utility for when you have those 20 minute slogs of time on a bus, waiting to meet someone at the coffee shop or kicking back in the living room.
Now imagine a Tablet device with that same value proposition but a larger form factor, ideal for reading magazines, graphic novels, classroom-in-a-book apps (Physics anyone?) and/or reference guides
Overlay on top of that Apple coming out with tools that enable anyone from solo publishers to big publishing houses to create books that are rich, graphical, that leverage touch/tilt/sound/video and are interactive, and you have a formula for Book Industry 2.0, something that I blogged about in:
Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time)
http://bit.ly/zOoEu
Check it out if interested.
Mark
8. batjam | 11.02.09
Now, if the app store can do to book prices what it did to game prices, the consumer will get a big win.
9. Karen McQuestion | 11.03.09
This is fascinating to me, since I have four books self-released on Kindle. I had doubts about ebooks at the start, but no more. My books (Favorite, A Scattered Life, Easily Amused and Lies I Told My Children) are selling well, and readers are responding favorably. Reviews are great and I’m making some money. I bought a Kindle a few weeks ago, and I love it–I’m now a believer. In the last few months the ebook revolution has heated up to the point that I have trouble keeping up with all the new developments. This iPhone app is the latest and I think it’s great. Whatever contributes to reading is all good in my book. I do wonder, though, how much of a dent this will make in Amazon’s Kindle sales, since the Kindle app is already a free download on the iPhone and iPod touch.
10. Katherine | 11.03.09
I love reading on the iphone. I have purchased 89 books to date for the iphone Kindle! My only disappointment is the the application doesn’t duplicate the ability to send a WORD document for transfer to the Kindle format (cost $.10 on the full Kindle). Otherwise I’m thrilled with it. I have the original SONY eReader, but find I use it less and less. One of the reasons I love the iphone is that you literally have almost everything at your fingertips all the time on a single device.
11. Grenadine | 11.03.09
How can something be “down from 117 per cent”? I can understand how the figure could decline 117 per cent, but how is it possible that something is ever 117 per cent in the first place?
(I sure miss journalism, and its editors…in the future, no one will ever know more than the average blogger does.)
12. Jeff | 11.03.09
Grenadine #11, I feel your pain. Journalism is a word that has ceased to have meaning. It has been replaced by the phrase copy and paste.
The only thing keeping me from reading all my books digitally is the price. At $1 or $2 I would buy books online for convenience, but when an ebook is more expensive than a paperback, I’ll just opt for the real book or the library. I think that if the prices were drastically reduced, publishers would actually see an explosion of downloads and make more money than they do now. Sadly, libraries would suffer.
14. Sally Jessup | 11.15.09
Nice article. Thank you. For me it is pretty hard to read on the phone. I’m going to try a differnt pair of glasses that might help. It sure is nice to have that sort of resource.
On a related note, I tried out the Jesus Lives - He’s Not An Illusion iphone app that is simply incredible. It allows you to literally see Jesus (even with bad eyes). At the end bible verses are shown. It is quite moving.
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8. » What's hot on iPhone? Books, books, books! | csmonitor.com - Mobile Phones Softwares, Games, Melody, Themes | 11.02.09
12. What’s the Buzz: One in Five iPhone Apps in Oct Were Books; Publishing Changes Empowers Readers | Publishing Perspectives | 11.04.09
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1. Josh | 11.02.09
Great article. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on my iPhone lately. The small screen does not bother me. Just got my iPhone a couple of months ago and I’ve been experimenting with a lot of new apps too. A friend recently recommended a very useful app called NeuroMobile.