iPad 'Killing' Amazon With Kindness, Boosting Kindle Store Sales

iPad 'Killing' Amazon With Kindness, Boosting Kindle Store Sales
By Tom Dulaney

Amazon ebooks are selling like mad—and iPad users are a big part of Amazon's success. The Los Angeles Times spread the news in a report on a survey by Cowen and Co.

Amazon dominates ebook sales, say Cowan analysts Jim Friedland and Kevin Kopelman, who  wrote the report. They project Amazon will log 76% of all ebook sales for all of 2010. The Apple iStore will get only 5% this year, they predict. By 2015, they forecast, Amazon will hold onto 51% of the market, and Apple will grab 16%.

Those are percentages of a rapidly expanding ebook marketplace. Digital book sales have grown by astounding numbers, ranging from monthly hikes of 140% or more since spring 2010. Cowen forecasts ebook sales by Amazon, alone, this year will be up 95% over last year, racking up $701 million in ebook receipts by New Year's Day.

Plus, Cowen estimates sales of the Kindle ebook reader will be up 140% to 5 million units this year compared to 2009.

The iPad is boosting Amazon's ebook fortunes, Cowen says. “Many assumed [the iPad] would be end of story for Amazon.com's Kindle Book Store and its black-and-white reader,” Friedland and Kopelman say.

Instead, iPad owners are buying loads of ebooks from the Amazon Kindle Store. “Greasing those book sales,” Alex Pham writes in the LA Times, “are Amazon's Kindle app for iPhone and iPad....You don't have to have a Kindle to buy a Kindle book.”

In fact, the Cowen report says, one in five people who buy digital books in the Kindle store don't own a Kindle.

“The "iPad is not having a negative impact on Kindle device or e-book sales," according to the report. "In fact, we think the adoption of tablets will boost Kindle e-book sales."

It's no surprise that Cowen discovered most iPad owners get their ebooks the easy way, direct from Apple's iBookstore.  About 60% of iPad owners who buy ebooks get them from Apple. But an impressive 31% of iPad users buy their ebooks from Amazon most of the time.

So-called "hard core" readers who buy more than 24 books a year are even more inclined to shop Amazon: 44% prefer using the Kindle books on the iPad, compared with 47% of iPad ebook buyers who prefer shopping the iBookstore. “Virtually a dead heat,” the LA Times' writer Pham rules. “So it seems we're into only the first chapters of the ebook wars.”