I love the Apple ecosystem. It’s not perfect, and the gap between it and the Google alternative isn’t as great as it used to be, but to my mind it’s still by far the best solution for anyone looking to have all their data and content available across both desktop and mobile devices.
That’s largely historical accident. As a very early adopter of ebooks (who’d have thunk it?), I bought the very first Kindle and it was love at first sight. For someone who loves to read, and typically has more than one book on the go at any given time, the ability to carry hundreds of books around with me wherever I went – and in a device so small and light I scarcely noticed its presence in a bag – was a dream.
I’m far from alone in this, of course: Kindle remains the dominant ebook platform. But to see some of the numbers that have been floating around over the past year or so, you might think it’s only a matter of time before iBooks overtakes Kindle.
A UK study found that 50% of ebook readers used Kindle while 31% used iBooks. A US study last summer suggested that in the 18-24 age-range, iBooks was now just 2% behind Kindle. In January, Apple’s iBooks head Keith Moerer said that the store had averaged a million new customers a week since the launch of iOS 8 and Yosemite.
So, both my anecdotal experience of friends, and some hard sales data for a couple of novels, suggests that iBooks is a lot further behind Kindle than some of the more general numbers might suggest. How to explain this?
I think the answer may be in the fact that users, customers and sales may be three very different things. iBooks now comes installed as standard on Macs, iPhones and iPads. Anyone who ever opens up the app to read part of a single book may be counted as a ‘user.’ I also rather suspect that Apple’s ‘customer’ numbers include anyone who has downloaded a book from iBooks, free or paid.
But even if customers are people who have paid for books, if your average iBooks customer buys one book a year and your average Kindle customer buys 13 books a year, there’s your 7%/92% split. So my suspicion is that even if iBooks is doing ok on the user and customer front, Kindle is still probably well ahead on sales.
Do you buy ebooks from iBooks, Kindle or elsewhere? Recognizing that some may buy from more than one source, please tick the one that represents the majority of your purchases, only going for the ‘Even split’ option if the split is close to 50/50. As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Images: Apple, Ben Lovejoy, Princess Watkins
