eBooks outnumber games in the App Store

According to the statistics there are 27,000 eBooks apps available in the Apple store which are more than the 25,400 gaming apps.That is really interesting figure out there....

I don't own an iPhone, but is considering if any new ones comes out this June (old regular phone dying).

Could someone enlighten me as how I could read my own unicode text/pdf on iPhone right now? I thought you cannot upload files into the phone and creating an "eBook" app for one single book is the only way to read anything on the iPhone.

thanks in advance. :)

Apple can't monetize it? You mean beyond the 30% cut they get from sales through the App Store?

I'm sure Apple will start culling all of them for "duplicating existing functionality".

@dsfx Amazon bought Lexcycle last year :http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/amazon-acquires-stanza-an-e-book-application-for-the-iphone/

"Currently there are over 10 times more free eBook apps than paid ones."

Doesn't that data show the complete opposite?

24629 are paid, against only 2348 free.

I certainly hope that there is some kind of eBook app purge. I'm sick of having to trudge through page after page of eBook apps on sites like AppShopper. And most of the eBook content is stuff I couldn't care less about.

I know it's quite trivial once you get the framework going, but now with in-app purchase, you would think that these devs would just release their eBook readers as a single app, and have the actual books as seperate downloadable content.

"Over the last reported month, new introductions of eBook apps more than doubled that of games (158 eBook versus 71 game apps). "

There must be kind of error in one of the sources -> for the past half year at least, every day there are AT LEAST 20-40 new books added; which means between 600 and 1000 books / month, instead of the 158 ebook apps the article mentions.

Just to add something, until very recently I thought that reading a whole book on an LED-backlit LCD was preposterous. Then, I happened to buy a book and decided I wanted to refresh myself by downloading the prequel. I did so with Stanza and a torrent (the prices were ridiculous, so I decided I would steal from them before they could steal from me! Looking forward to paying reasonable prices, though.)

All I can say is it was all of the personal experience that I had come to expect from a book. And I read it on the beach. I think part of that feeling comes from the iphone itself, which is a joy to use and very personal in its own right, but the flipping of the pages and the different text sizes simply made reading a whole book a joy. Chapters, bookmarks, instant word definitions... better than a printed novel, more practical, and easier.

I returned the paperback I had bought and ended up not reading it at all, but I have it saved for a rainy day. All avid readers should try it out. :)

EBooks on iPad will be interesting to see develope. However I can't see Apple getting to excited about the other eBook readers as the data is mostly public domain. They might compete by offering free downloads even.

Let's face it the classics long out of copyright have no value. Atleast not in the monetary sense of a copyrighted work. Like iTunesU though there is a cultural value that is hard to quantify. I could see Apple wanting to stake out the free works for the same reasons it runs iTunesU. It enriches the ITunes environment and draws in customers.

Of course one never knows with Apple but they aren't as bad with app store and iTunes as some make them out to be. Rather like the record companies they have to come to an agreement and contract to do business with the providers. It is more a question of what those contracts force than Apples corporate desires. If they can effectively corner the market like they did with iTunes then we will see renegotiations in a couple of years. Further Apple is representing many publishers, they could easily turn theses app producers into publishers. There really isnt much effort required in publishing the works of long dead authors, so one way or another these old works will end up on the platform.


Dave