Apple recently announced their new iBooks platform which brings much more functionality to digital books. Also, they revealed that they will now be selling textbooks through their service and it seems that with being on the market less than a week, has paid off quite well.
The company managed to get on-board Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who control 90% of the market. In just three days, they sold over 350,000 textbooks.
“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.”
The World is shifting to more digital means. No longer are we bound by the old confines of media, that is physical books and copies of material. And being that more and more people are consuming more and more content on their digital devices, it was a great fit for the tech giant to get textbook makers involved, just like they did with music and iTunes which revolutionized the music industry.
What makes this all very interesting is that as the growth of the iPad increases, so does the potential for sales of things that can be specifically used on the tablet. Textbook makers actually will make more money by selling a digital and interactive copy versus selling a traditional copy via retail. Combine this with the fact that users will no longer have to lug around 100 pounds of books, and you’ve got yourself a win-win situation.
Is Apple on to something here? Would you rather have your textbooks digital?
