Apple adding one million new iBooks customers every week

Apple’s iBooks turns five this spring. The application was announced in January 2010 and launched a few months later, in April. In the five years since, Apple hasn’t talked much about iBooks numbers or stats. However, based on the numbers offered by iBooks director Keith Moerer earlier this week, we have a feeling its next status report (perhaps at WWDC) will include some information on the success of Apple’s own ebook app.

GigaOm reports that while speaking at the Digital Book World Conference on Thursday, Moerer revealed that iBooks is adding one million new customers each week and has been since September.

The catalyst for what we can only assume is a surge in iBooks purchases (again, without previous numbers, we have no way of really knowing how well it was doing), is iOS 8. The new version represents the first time Apple has preinstalled iBooks on its devices. It’s also now shipping with Yosemite (a first for its desktop OS, too), but Moer told attendees at the conference that the company is seeing more of its sales come from phones.

Apple seemed more happy to talk about ebook sales in the first couple of years following iBooks’ launch. Things are a bit different now. In 2014, DigitalBooksWorld spent a month trying to figure out just how much of the ebook marketshare Apple had compared to Amazon and Barnes & Noble just in the U.S., and still couldn’t get a consistent answer no matter who they asked (big publishers, small publishers, indie publishers, you name it). What’s clear is that Apple was growing then and with the success of iBooks, it’s adding customers at an astounding rate.

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[source]GigaOm[/source]