Three days after Apple launched iBooks 2 with textbook support, an estimated 350,000 textbooks have been downloaded. That, my friends, is pretty impressive if the numbers are accurate.
John Paczkowski, All Things D:
According to Global Equities Research, which monitors Apple’s iBook sales via a proprietary tracking system it doesn’t much care to discuss, more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded from the company’s iBooks Store within the first three days of availability. And there were some 90,000 downloads of iBooks Author, Apple’s free textbook-creation tool, during the same time.
While this is way too early to tell if Apple’s textbook initiative has legs, these numbers are promising. At the very least, it shows that there is an interest in the textbook market for a better solution. What remains to be seen is if Apple can disrupt textbooks like they were able to do in the early aughts with the music industry.
Besides adoption in schools, the other interesting variable that has yet to be seen is if other companies are going to try to go head to head with Apple in this market. Will Amazon see this as a challenge to the Kindle’s dominance in the eBook field? If so, they might try to undercut Apple with device pricing for schools. The education sector, if it bothers to step up, is in for an interesting few years ahead. When Apple takes notice of your market, things are likely to be shaken up quickly.
Source: All Things D
