1.5 Million
by Egatz
©2010 Apple Inc.
Apple has released sales figures for the first month of the iPad, and publishers are taking note. Publishers Marketplace (no, I don’t understand where the apostrophe went) has reported significant sales of e-books during the initial 28 days of iPad.
More significantly, Apple reported 1.5 million e-books were sold in the initial period. This isn’t too shabby, especially considering the app you need to read books on the iPad perversely doesn’t ship with the hardware itself, and must be downloaded. Well, the Great and Powerful Jobs works in mysterious ways, and mere mortals are often left to ponder things in this universe, like how to change user-inaccessible batteries.
I hope this will excite publishers, as opposed to fears they may have had. I hope people will read more books now that the hardware monopoly on the delivery mechanism of dead trees / printing / warehousing / trucking / retail shelf space have been made effectively no longer necessary. I hope my students don’t ask for e-books because I don’t have them finished. Yet. With the numbers Apple’s reporting, there’s not much hope left for the excuse-makers.