John Paczkowski at All Things D reports today that following its educational event in New York last week, where it launched iBooks 2 and the amazing new iPad textbooks, a phenomenal 350,000 textbooks have been downloaded from iTunes in just three days. The figures come courtesy of Global Equities Research, which has used a tracking system to monitor Apple’s iBook sales. As well as this impressive figure, Global Equities’ figures also show that Apple’s free textbook publishing app, iBooks Author, was downloaded 90,000 times from the Mac App Store. Paczkowski notes that if these figures are correct, it would seem that Apple’s education initiative is already paying dividends for the company, and he says that this is great news for textbook publishers in particular, as they can actually make more money from books sold through iBooks than from those that are sold in retail stores. Global Equities Research says that this is because the markup on textbooks in the supply chain is around 33% to 35%, so publishers can save money by using iBooks to bypass the distributer and wholesaler. They add that in general iBooks cost approximately 80% less to publish than print books do.


Source: 350,000 Textbooks Downloaded From Apple's iBooks in Three Days - John Paczkowski - News - AllThingsD

Wow , that's alot