“Adam Parks is an avid reader of digital books. But you won’t find him downloading the 20 or so titles he reads each year onto an electronic book device like Amazon’s Kindle. Instead, Parks flips through pages—Web-site design manuals and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War are recent favorites—on his trusted iPhone,” Olga Kharif reports for BusinessWeek.
“Parks is one of a growing number of people getting their book fix via mobile phone, a method he considers more convenient than using a dedicated e-book reader like the Kindle or Sony’s Reader Digital Book,” Kharif reports. “‘I travel a lot in Asia and in the U.S.,’ says Parks, a marketing executive who resides in Palm Beach, Fla. ‘If you are running from airport to airport and from city to city, bringing an extra piece of equipment loses some of its value.’”
“Users of the iPhone and its cousin, the iPod touch, have downloaded William Shakespeare’s collected works more than 300,000 times from the Apple iTunes App Store, according to Readdle, the Ukraine-based startup that created the free application that makes the download possible. The books section in the Apple iTunes App Store lists about 700 titles; Apple separately offers 72 audio books,” Kharif reports.
“Amazon doesn’t disclose sales figures for its e-readers but Citigroup estimates that Amazon sold 380,000 Kindles in 2008. In December, Sony said it has sold 300,000 units of its e-reader since the device was introduced in 2006,” Kharif reports. “Analysts estimate the makers of e-readers have sold fewer than 1 million units since the devices were introduced.”
MacDailyNews Note: Apple has sold roughly 20 million iPhones to date.
Kharif continues, “In December, Random House made some of its best sellers available through the iPhone iphoneand iPod touch. A month earlier, publishers Pan Macmillan and Simon & Schuster made their books available for the iPhone through a free application called Stanza, made by Lexcycle. Users download the software to gain access to Stanza’s own bookshop, which offers more than 100,000 titles, about half of them free. Lexcycle Chief Operating Officer Neelan Choksi says users are downloading about 40,000 books a day.”
Full article here.
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