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Apple is Dominating The eBook Market on iOS

By 15 Comments

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Apple is currently dominating eBook sales on iOS and has now bundled their iBookstore  on all devices that run iOS 8. The Capturino company has relegated Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo to being ineffective players on the global stage, and its by design.

July 2011 was a dark day for readers, as Amazon, Nook and Kobo eBook sales were suspended on iOS. The companies all updated their apps to remove the ability to purchase books, comics, newspapers and magazines. The booksellers all did this because Apple had implemented a policy for all in-app purchases to be done through them and not 3rd parties. This would not be so bad, but Apple also was taking a 30% commission out of every purchase. All of the major eBook players realized that they were losing critical user data and giving Apple a cut of millions of dollars worth of sales did not make financial sense.

Online booksellers have to pay a percentage to the publisher whenever a book is sold and most companies like Amazon rely on razor thin margins. It was impossible to give Apple a 30% cut of every sale, they would likely lose money.

Today, customers cannot install the Kindle or Nook app and buy books. They apps themselves have all turned into glorified e-reading apps. This Apple policy has also damaged comic book sellers, such as Comixology. They removed in-app purchases back in April 2014, a few weeks after it was acquired by Amazon. Comic lovers lambasted the company saying they removed the discovery and impulse purchase aspect of the app, thereby ruinning the experience. Honestly, who wants to visit a website to browse, buy and sync over new content to the app. Wouldn’t it be way easier just to deal with a company that had in-app purchases? This is how Apple is winning the eBook war on iOS.

Apple has sold more than 550 million iPhones and more than 237 million iPads, and its impact on the eBook  market is set to grow significantly. The new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, both have larger screens than their predecessors. This makes e-reading more enjoyable, and comics and graphic novels shine a bit more.

Apple is now ramping up their efforts to reach casual readers with new discovery features in iBooks. The app now includes a solid selection of  free eBooks and additional categories to help consumers find the books they want. The titles offered in the “Great Free Books” section represent a variety of genres and reading tastes. Among them are Private by James Patterson, Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez and Justice League, Vol. 1: Origin by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee.

One of the big new initiatives on the iBooks app is curation and editorial content. There is now more seasonal and topical lists that abide by cool themes. Oh, and one of the biggest cleanups was removing Breakout Books, which was sourced by Smashwords. Indie authors have been booted off from the platform, in order to help readers find more quality content. In the future, you will soon be able to get book recommendations before and after purchases with technology leveraged by Booklamp, a company Apple bought a few months ago.

Apple is borrowing a page out of Barnes and Nobles playbook by advertising their online bookstore in the retail environment. There is a new promotion campaigns to advertise the social aspect of the store and to make it clear how easy it is to buy and read. Recently, Apple orchestrated a Meet the Author events at the SoHo store in Manhattan. It  featured bestselling YA novelist John Green, comics artist Jim Lee, Batman writer Scott Snyder, and actress and author Gillian Anderson.

There simply isn’t any major competition left on iOS that Apple has to compete with anymore. All newspaper, magazine, newspaper and audiobook sales are all sourced from the Newsstand or iTunes directly, so Apple gets a cut out of everything.

Michael Kozlowski

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.

  • def4

    Don’t be silly. All e-books ecosystems are closed.
    Where’s your sob story about the lack of iBooks on Kindle?
    There’s none because that idea makes no sense.

    Comixology was doing just fine on iOS despite paying 30% to Apple.
    That should be proof enough that everyone disabled in app purchases because they wanted to not because they had to.

  • dontbugme9999

    On an Android device I can buy from B&N, Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, and any other store with an Android app. iBooks doesn’t have an Android app. So what closed ecosystem are you talking about?

  • Wpjs67

    I miss the old ibooks app that looked like a book. Once they updated to the boring white space- I left for Kindle paperwhite

  • Amazon, Nook, Kobo and hundreds of other bookstores are on Android, because Google doesn’t get a cut out of every sale.

  • You used to be able to buy eBooks from all of these companies on iOS, these booksellers willingly disabled in-app purchases because they did not want to pay Apple 30% commission on every book. Moreso, when Apple started to handle all payments, booksellers lost critical userdata for the purposes of marketing.

  • def4

    That’s what I like about Apple: they put me, their customer, first.
    I can still allow publishers to see what iBooks I buy, but it’s up to me.

  • def4

    They’re all on iOS as well, they just don’t implement in app purchases.
    But why should I care about having hundreds of bookstores anyway?

  • def4

    The Kindle ecosystem.
    If you buy Amazon hardware, you must buy from Amazon and nobody cries about it.
    If you buy Apple hardware, you must buy from Apple but people moan endlessly about it.

  • Tom Terrill

    Not ALL ebook systems are closed. NOOK deserves to be singled out for selling its hardware from 2012 onward with the ability to download and use apps from all other major e-tailers (Kindle, Kobo, Google) that are available on the Android platform.

  • Tom Terrill

    Willingly is the wrong term. The fact is that none of the ebook retailers ever implemented in-app purchases. They were all linking customers to their web store via an in-app buy button. Any iOS developer can tell you that in-app purchase is not trivial to implement. And when you consider the options that were available at that time for in-app purchase price points while also recalling that they were contractually obligated to sell books at a specific publisher price (a deal which was also architected by Apple), there was actually no practical options available except to remove the buy button or face being de-listed from the store.

  • InklingBooks

    I loathe Apple’s inflated 30% fee for in-app purchases. If the DOJ had gone after that, I’d have been as delighted as I was disgusted by their claims that Apple engaged in price-fixing. Then again, I’ve given up seeing anything sensible out of this administration. Witness the on-going blunders with Ebola.

    But not being able to buy ebooks via an app is no big deal. For Kindle books, I always buy their via my Mac and a browser anyway. Given how easy it is for a smartphone to get lost or stolen, I don’t want to make it easy to buy on one. I research and buy books on my Mac and then say, “Send it to my Kindle 3.”

    Unlike you, I’m remarkable unimpressed with the effort Apple is putting into promoting ebook sales. Their promotion has been so anemic, including iBooks with iOS 8 was considered radical. Would it be considered radical if Amazon shipped Kindle Fires with their reader apps.

    If Apple wants to get serious about ebook sales it needs to:

    1. Offer a discount coupon good on ebooks from the iBookstore with each Mac and iDevice sale. That’s get people who’ve grown accustomed to the Kindle reader familiar with iBooks.

    2. Port iBooks to Windows and Android much like Apple did the iTunes app. Even people who own Apple gear may be a bit dubious about tying their book collection to one vendor.

    –Michael W. Perry, co-author of Lily’s Ride

  • One of the best things Apple does is give authors the free iBooks Author system for publishing and the templates are great stuff. Lots of new stuff and if only Apple would start marketing ebooks like Amazon does, then we’d all be better off. I have just upgraded to the new Yosemite OS on my Macbook Pro but the Kindle books no longer show now. The Kindle books I have on my iPad still work and that’s OS8. I’m hoping this is just temporary and if anyone else has this problem I’d like to know how to fix it. Thanks..

  • I forgot to add, that I author my books in Pages and export them to EPUB files. They look great on my mac and iPad but Amazon, for some reason with their MOBI conversion process, the Table of Contents don’t show up. Otherwise, I love working with Amazon and they outsell the iTunes by a wide margin. bogus beauty.com

  • Kristen McLean

    HI Michael, Sales of books through Google Play payment processing also loose a cut to Google. However, users can also opt to pay via credit card at the time of purchase, and those sales only loose the 4-5% to Visa. So apps with in-app purchasing of books–like those on Chicago-based Page Foundry’s platform, such as Chicago Tribune’s TribBooks–make a much better margin on Android (indeed they GET some margin), even though they do in-app purchasing on both platforms.