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Back in early June, Steve Jobs went on stage and made a bold claim about the iPad. According to Jobs, "in the first 65 days, users have downloaded over 5 million books," equating to about two and a half books per iPad. By his numbers, that put the iBooks market share of ebooks from five or six major publishers to 22 percent in just 8 weeks time, an impressive feat, if it was true.
Jobs may very well be right, but if he is, not all authors are seeing those same kind of numbers. Mystery author J.A. Konrath, for example, is one of the few authors who publishes numbers on ebook sales, and according to his most recent blog post, Apple's iBooks platform doesn't hold a candle to Kindle.
"Publishers might be looking at enriched or enhanced ebooks as their new big-ticket items to replace hardcovers," Konrath writes. "But the major ebook retailer, Amazon, isn't set up for video. Kindle isn't even able to do color yet. That leaves Apple, and according to my numbers, Apple is a very small part of the ebook market. I sell 200 ebooks a day on Kindle. On iPad, I sell 100 a month."
That adds up to 6,000 ebooks through Kindle per month, versus 100 for the iBooks platform, or a 60-to-1 ratio. If his numbers are any indication of across the board performance, Jobs may need to invest in a new magical calculator.
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