If video killed the radio star, have apps killed the bestseller book? Perhaps not quite yet, but a look at e-book sales compared to apps at Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) does raise some questions about how the rise of one category may end up crowding out the other.
The table below, put together by the analyst Horace Dediu at European analysts Asymco, charts how e-books and apps have sold since debuting on iTunes at Apple. Music is the third line represented.

As you can see from the data, there were 15 times as many apps downloaded as there were e-books, when you compare the two at 11 months after each launched. (Note this is a comparison of unit sales, not revenues.) Music is half as many, but music is also the most mature of the three, having been launched in 2003, well before the iPhone hit the market, so perhaps it would naturally have had a slower start.
There a number of reasons why e-books are far less popular on iTunes than apps:
For one, there are a number of other devices and places to buy books beyond Apple’s own app store — Kindle from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), and the Nook From Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) and the Kobo being just a few — and it could be that iPhone/iPad users are still holding on to those separate devices for their e-reading consumption.
And on the Apple side, given how dominant Apple is with its App Store model, is it any surprise that it’s the go-to place for apps for users of its devices?
Dediu acknowledges that this could be a platform-specific phenomenon. He notes: “Perhaps Kindle ebooks outsell Amazon music downloads, but we don’t have comparable data from Amazon and it would be a challenge to compare the two Amazon media as they are packaged and dlievered in different ways (Amazon’s digital music is not an integrated offering while their ebooks are.)”
And on a more general level beyond Apple and Amazon, there is the issue of price advantage over books: while a few apps are pricey, there are hundreds of thousands that are less than $2 or even free.
But Dediu points to another important trend: apps are replacing books as the preferred form of solitary entertainment. “For three centuries, the book medium had a monopoly on solitary entertainment. The download data shows how quickly new media displace the old,” he writes in the corresponding post. That trend will likely play a big role in how books are written and delivered longer-term.

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