The last time we brought author Joe Konrath to these pages a minor firestorm ignited over exactly how we were parsing his data. He remains a controversial figure in the writing and publishing worlds, but today our topic is far less incendiary.
Konrath has just passed the 100,000 eBooks sold mark, and he has shared his numbers as to on which platforms the books were sold. To put the most important number up first, Konrath sold 78,412 of the 100,000 eBooks on Kindle.
He had harsh words for the iPad as an eReader (he is mostly referring to iBooks here, making a common non-technologist mistake of conflating the iPad and iBooks platforms):
iPad has proven disappointing, and I blame the iBookstore interface, which is very user unfriendly. I assume it will get the kinks worked out eventually, but it is currently torture to navigate and browse the iBookstore. Still, almost 400 sales in just a few months is better than nothing.
If you tally up all of Konrath’s eBooks sales that went through an Apple products, “compared Kindle sales, I’m [Konrath] selling 70 to 1 on Amazon over iPad [Apple].”
Again, these are numbers from one fiction author, but in terms of transparency Joe cannot be beaten. He shares his revenues, sales, timetables, and everything else that we could ask for. Take the numbers with a grain of salt also because the sample size here is not as large as we could hope for, but numbers this open for 100,000 sales are quasi-impossible to match.
What do you think? Is iBooks hard to use? Can it catch Kindle, or is iBooks doomed to be Apple’s Zune, a me-too product that will never catch up?
don’t think iBooks is hard to use, do think it will be hard to catch Amazon given the Kindle app’s availability on seemingly every platform. having started with a Kindle, Amazon is still my default destination when I am looking for a book, but I like the iBooks app interface, and believe Apple will eventually come close to, if not, surpass Amazon’s selection of available titles. Amazon did have a 3 year head start, and I fully believe iBooks will not be “Apple’s Zune.”
Wait, so Kindle is going to stomp iBooks, but iBooks is not a Zune?
I personally find both stores mediocre at best. Neither is great in finding books, and selection is incredibly poor. I literally haven’t been able to purchase a single book I wanted, they were not available in either store. And no, I wasn’t looking for some esoteric stuff, just regular fiction and non-fiction titles. This industry has a long way to go if they want to defeat piracy.
That sounds a little high-pitched, they both have more than 500,000 books I do believe. Surely your “regular” books would at least sometimes be a part.
Although, I do suppose that it could have been their poor interface that threw you off!
The funny thing is, I’m not exaggerating at all. 500000 sounds like a lot, but turns out it isn’t. At least the number itself doesn’t reveal much.
I’d like to see more authors taking-up the challenge of pageramming. It’s what eBooks should have been from the start.