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After a report from the mobile analytics company Flurry, showing the number of book apps released to Apple’s App Store surpassing the numbers of any other type of application, it has been argued that the surge of book apps would indicate that the iPhone poses a challenge to the Kindle. Although it has been approved by Distimo, another mobile analytics company, that the highest percentage of paid apps in the App Store are book apps and a new wave of apps is on the way for Apple’s announced iPad tablet, it seems to be a bit sketchy judging the rivalry between Amazon and Apple just by counting apps.

Kurt Schiller in the January edition of Information Today refers to Frederic Lardinois of ReadWriteWeb who “wrote that the numbers reflected the practice of releasing ebooks as stand-alone apps and added, ‘[I]t’s quite easy for developers to release large numbers of e-books. Developers just have to switch out the text, rename the app and send it to Apple for approval.’” Schiller also quotes John Herrman of Gizmodo who “observed that a single public domain title may have as many as a dozen individual apps.” (Schiller 2010)

Compared to currently about 27,000 App Store book apps available for reading on an iPod or iPhone, Amazon offers more than 410,000 ebooks for the Kindle platform in file format.

Even if one takes all app stores into account, most publishers are pursuing a multi-platform strategy and there will be standards for developing apps across multiple platforms as just announced at the Mobile World Congress. Eventually, taking out the redundancies, the amount of all book apps combined should be not overwhelmingly different than the amount of apps within the leading app store.

Although there are more than 40 million iPhones sold compared to estimated two to three million Kindle reading devices, all Apple devices are not yet suitable for long-form reading and the Kindle is not just a device but a multi-device platform available for the iPhone as well as PC and soon Mac and Blackberry. Because selling hardware still is Apple’s main business and the value of the hardware is determined by useful apps and content which can be “played” on it, there might be a Kindle app for the iPad, just as there are music apps competing with iTunes on the iPod and iPhone.

More important, and certainly one of the strengths of Amazon, is having information about ebook purchases and ebook usage. Therefore, not just because the reflective display of the reading device, Amazon’s platform, much more than Apple’s, is dedicated to people who are reading a lot – and this small percentage of readers contributes the largest chunk to ebook revenues.

By introducing the Active Content SDK and app store, Amazon will be able to deliver not only apps for improved reading of ebook files but, as other app stores, self-contained content apps for books as well. Also the Kindle devices will become more open regarding Internet access. In contrast to app stores and classical ebook stores mainly delivering file downloads, Google will enter the fast growing ebook market with Google Editions, a device independent cloud-based approach where ebooks can be read online as well as offline using HTML5.

At the same time books are in a process of constant price decline (Clement 2009), and data about purchasing and reading books becomes pivotal also for new book business models. Mobile native apps and browser based ebook platforms offer a whole host of new possibilities for analysis of content related data and integration of external data sources for creating value added services and enhanced semantic content.

Authors more often are passing rights directly to Amazon while publishers are questioning the agency model and are asserting contractual terms that mean the publisher is licensing its rights to Amazon for having the works “republished via the Kindle publishing platform”. Having the final say about how this platform looks like and basically becoming a publisher itself, Amazon eventually is in a better position than Apple to adapt ebook content flexibly to native and web apps for leveraging the sprouting value of text-rich mobile content.

References:

Clement, M., 2009. Ökonomie der Buchindustrie Herausforderungen in der Buchbranche erfolgreich managen :: Wiesbaden, Gabler Verlag / GWV Fachverlage GmbH, Wiesbaden.

Schiller, K., Jan2010. Ebook Apps Multiply on iPhone. Information Today, 27(1), p19-19.

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