Quote:
Originally Posted by Maggie Leung
I've spent 99 cents on an iPad guide. Don't plan to buy others from iBooks because they're tethered to Apple only.
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This is a good point. The Kindle books can be read on more than one device and the Apple books cannot. Plus-
- Not everyone prefers reading on the iPad. Personally, I love mine for teaching, light gaming and media consumption but prefer a Kindle-sized screen---I have been trained, I guess, to read books on that size of a page, and the longer/bigger page of the iPad makes me feel impatient.
- Not everyone who buys an iPad prefers reading novels. They may attract the manga/comic/magazine crowd (Zinio is gorgeous and subscriptions are quite affordable) but those are not Apple purchases.
- Not everyone who buys an iPad prefers reading, period. Some are buying it to play games, watch videos, entertain kids etc. Some will use the PDF function to read their personal documents.
- iBooks is currently not selling books world-wide. At least, here in Canada, all you can get are the freebies.
I also think that people who buy the Kindle---since all it can do is read---are pretty much guaranteed customers, from a statistical standpoint. Some will know where to get public domain freebies and prefer to read those, but the vast majority of people who buy a Kindle buy it for the purposes of reading novels, which they buy from the device itself via the Kindle store. The same cannot be said of iPad customers, who as I said may not read at all, may not read novels at all, may already be enmeshed in another store, or may be reluctant to jump aboard the locked-in Apple DRM train.
I am not denying that Apple is a major player, from a hardware standpoint. But as far as the business of selling books goes, the game is FAR from over.