Coming to an iPhone near you: lots of books

There are now more than 45 million iPhones in the world, each offering more electronic diversions than you can shake a small stick at, via the highly profitable wonders of Apple’s App Store. And what, apart from making phone calls, are iPhone users and App developers expending most of their energies on? As of this September, the answer is an unexpected one: books. For the first time ever, books have overtaken games as the category of App with the largest number of monthly releases.

To be precise, according to industry analyst Flurry’s October report:

In October, one out of every five new apps launching in the iPhone has been a book. Publishers of all kinds, from small ones like Your Mobile Apps to mega-publishers like Softbank, are porting existing IP into the App Store at record rates. Flurry first evaluated the iPhone as an eBook reader in its July Pulse (”You Trying to Swindle my Kindle?”) where it looked at consumer demand for eBooks. In that report, we observed that during the month of August 1 per cent of the entire US population was already reading a book on the iPhone. Now, with books shipping in droves, we are seeing the supply-side explode.

What does this mean? As some bloggers have already pointed out, it’s a pretty impressive debunking of Steve Jobs’s comment to the New York Times in 2008 that “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.” It’s also a sign that, after just over a year of the iPhone, publishers are finally starting to cotton on to the potentials of this new marketplace—and its validity as a platform for publishing words in their own right, rather than merely a gadget for games and other interactive gizmos. But I’d like to think, too, that it’s a sign of the fundamental resilience and importance of large chunks of crafted text within a new-media world; and a hopeful counterpoint to the pessimistic view that the physical book is the only “true” reading format, or that the Kindle is the only digital alternative to paper. And, of course, there’s nothing quite like an iPhone for reading in bed. You can clasp it in one hand under the covers, zip your way through a free edition of the complete works of Shakespeare (or a rather pricier spot of Dan Brown if you prefer), and you don’t even need to leave a light on…