JUst to show that I'm not just all Apple fanboy, here's a article by Josh Benton, who is certainly critical of Apple's interventions in the news and book industry. In fact, he has written a whole series of thoughtful articles on what digital media means for the news business, well worth reading.
An excerpt from an article:
Quote:
In the two months since the iPad launched — and with it Apple’s new ebook platform, iBooks — Apple has taken over a remarkable 22 percent of the ebook market. (That’s based on data from five of the six major publishing companies; the sixth, Random House, isn’t on the iPad.)
In one sentence, Jobs revealed more hard data about ebook sales than Amazon has in 2.5 years of the Kindle. (I exaggerate, but only slightly. Amazon still hasn’t unveiled any hard numbers on Kindle device or ebook sales. Maybe this will prompt them.)
Those Apple ebook sales are based on the 2 million iPads sold, which are the only Apple devices that have iBooks. But iBooks is coming to the iPhone and iPod touch later this month — around the same time Jobs said the 100 millionth iPhone OS device will be sold. In other words, iBooks’ momentum is about to get punched up.
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http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/app...bile-strategy/
That was back in June 2010. I'm betting iOS has a much bigger chunk of the ebook market now-and that's without Random House (now in the tent) and without trying all that hard (We all agree the iBooks store could be much better).What this means is that like it or not the iOS platform really will be come dominant for ebook sales soon. What THAT means, I'm not sure.