Flurry, the San Francisco-based mobile analytics company that told us about app addiction earlier today came up with some interesting new App Store charts. They’ve been watching the number of newly accepted apps to the App Store since its launch and the proportions really didn’t change much for over a year, games were always the number one category.
Surprisingly the tendency suddenly changed this September, the amount of newly released Ebooks started to rise and quickly overtook games in the App Store. It looks like Book Editors are porting their entire catalogs to the iPhone, exactly what happened with Game Editors a year ago:
In October, one out of every five new apps launching in the iPhone has been a book. Publishers of all kinds, from small ones like Your Mobile Apps to mega-publishers like Softbank, are porting existing IP into the App Store at record rates. [...] we observed that during the month of August 1% of the entire U.S. population was already reading a book on the iPhone. Now, with books shipping in droves, we are seeing the supply-side explode.
I find it hard to read more than a tweet on my iPhone, I wonder if there is a demand really…
[via The Flurry Blog]
I have read several books using Stanza for the iPhone, though I still prefer to read actual books most of the time. A larger-screened device would be optimal, especially if the battery life increased.
My iPhone has over 100 ebooks on it in Stanza, eReader, Kindle and Laridian PocketBible. I’ve probably read twice that many on it plus many hundreds of blogs and other articles via RSS feeds. I have not written or read more than a hundred or so tweets. Let millions of variations of app addiction bloom!
It’s true that there are more ebooks in the AppStore than games. I wonder though, what the download counts are for the categories Books and Games. I get the feeling that Games will still have more downloads than Books.
I personally don’t have any ebooks on my iPhone. I do, however, have quite a few comic books downloaded. I have both Comixology’s Comics and iVerse Media’s iVerse Comics apps on my iPhone and have purchased comics from both apps. I prefer Comixology’s Comics app since it has a very interesting way of presenting the comic book. iVerse has more mainstream comics to purchase.
Also, I don’t have to purchase 20-30 apps in order to have 20-30 ebooks on my device. I really hate these ebooks where they offer only one title per app icon. I don’t have enough space on my device’s Springboard as it is, I don’t need it cluttered with multiple book icons.
I really wish Apple would start insisting that developers that have multiple apps (Brighthouse Labs comes to mind as well as many other developers that like to put out hundreds of copies of the same application with a slightly different name and some different data. Those apps should be a single app with in-app purchasing.
Sorry, but I have about 400 apps that I would like to have access to instead of only having access to 180.
The reason companies don’t want to use the in app purchase for multiple apps is that it reduces the amount of shelf space the get on the store. The publisher is much more likely to get multiple sale with 100 apps spread out over the store each being able to have it’s own keyword submission than just one app with in app purchase available. If the search functionality was better that might change things. Unless you hit a home run with your app the more shelf space the better for most developers