I had wondered about this for awhile; having an interest in photography, I’ve got a copy of Master Your DSLR Camera. When I went to the BetterBook site, I noticed that the ebook was available as an app. It’s an ebook. It’s for sale on iTunes. It’s #1 in the iBookstore, but way lower on the app store. I saw this as probably a failure of Apple; they must have categorized the ebook incorrectly, or the ebook creator had made a mistake with the upload.
Turns out that the publisher – Open Air – is selling 10 to 30 times as many ebooks through the app store as they are through iBookstore. Being #1 in the iBookstore is 10 sales a day. Ranking around 7th in the App Store translates to 150 sales a day.
Laura Hazard Owen wrote a piece about this particular book over on PaidContent, titled “Want to publish an ebook for iOS? Surprising tips from iPad publisher Open Air.”
From the article:
Open Air sells 10 to 30 times more books through the App Store than through the iBookstore. Open Air started out only publishing its titles as iPad apps and selling them in the App Store. Then, when Apple launched its publishing platform iBooks Author, Open Air decided to adapt its titles for the iBookstore and for Kindle.
and:
Why the discrepancy between the App Store and the iBookstore? Feldman suggested it’s because customers still don’t really understand what the iBookstore is, and don’t do much browsing or discovery there. When Open Air’s customers visit one of the company’s landing pages for a book, when they are given the option of choosing an iBooks version or an app version, “we see much higher conversion rates on that traffic in the App Store,” Feldman said, even though the books are “substantially similar in terms of content” and the user presumably already has an iTunes account that allows him or her to purchase from either the iBookstore or the App Store.
So, for those of you thinking of a more ‘interactive’ ebook, you might want to think about selling it through the App Store, rather than iBookstore.
Your can read the whole article HERE.
Your can find more from PaidContent HERE.