iBooks App Slips as Kindle App Jumps in the iPad App Store

By Stephen Windwalker
Editor of iPad Nation Daily
Originally posted May 8, 2010

Related posts:

In Thinking About Google Books, the Kindle, and the iPad, How About a Little Reality?

at Teleread: Don’t diss Stanza and people who love e-books, Jeff—including us iPad owners

Click here to have posts like this one from iPad Nation Daily pushed directly to your Kindle 24/7 with a free 14-day trial from the Kindle Blogs Store

See updated status report below.

Could this be a watershed moment?

Apple's iBooks Store has just fallen from the top rung among free iPad Apps in Apple's Top Charts listing. Beatweek Magazine called attention to the iBooks' slippage, in which it has been supplanted an utterly lovely ambient app called Pocket Pond (see screen shot at the right, but it is just the beginning). As the screen shots at the end of this post attest, Pocket Pond is the new #1 free app for the iPad, iBooks has fallen to #2, and the Kindle Store has climbed from the mid-20s to #13 in recent days.


Naturally, after all we have heard about iBooks during the past three months, most of us iPad owners were eager to download it for free and try it out. The reading environment is very nice for indoor reading, but iBooks has a long way to go to compete in the ebook content marketplace when it comes to selection, prices, user-friendly search/sort/browse features, and access to a critical mass of reader ratings and reviews.

The flip side of these shortcomings and the obvious likelihood of comparison with the 2 1/2 year old granddaddy of all ebook readers may be among the reasons why the iBooks fall is juxtaposed with the Kindle app's rise, but they are not the only reasons. As the three ads on a single web page in the screen shot at right suggest, however anecdotally, Amazon is investing plenty in making sure that iPad owners and enthusiasts are aware of the ease with which they can download the Kindle for iPad app free in a few seconds to gain access its 512,000 ebook offerings, at a mean price that's about half the mean price of the iBooks store's comparatively meager array catalog offerings.

Of course, snapshots are just snapshots, and it remains to be seen what the long-term trends will be. I'm finding the iPad a terrific place to read Kindle books, listen to free Audiobooks and paid Audible.com books, and read free Internet Archive texts in ePub with the Stanza for iPhone app (even after the departure of Stanza fountainhead Neelan Choksi from Stanza.Amazon.com yesterday). Stanza doesn't show up in the iPad rankings because its app is designed for the iPhone and iPod Touch and has not been optimized for the iPad, but it remains prominent in the smaller devices' app store ebook-related rankings and may still be the best way for an iPad owner to access over two million texts that are available from the Internet Archive, to say nothing of 12 million titles that may be available in the sweet bye and bye from Google Books.

Update: As of 7 pm ET May 9, 2010, 24 hours after the original post, the iBooks App has moved back to the #1 Free Apps position in Apple's TopCharts sales rankings, but the Kindle app continues to climb and has passed a Solitaire app and the Dictionary.com app to move into the #10 position.

iPad Nation Daily Free Books Alert for Saturday, April 17: Focusing on the Free Stanza App and Thousands of Free Books on Your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch

By Stephen Windwalker, Editor of iPad Nation Daily

Among the things that bind us together as citizens of iPad Nation are our love for reading and our love for these nifty gadgets Apple has made for us, whether we're talking about the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod Touch or our various Macs. Some may say that we're just here for the music, the games, and the videos, but the truth is that we love to read, and iPad Nation Daily is here to help us find the best selection, the best prices, and the best reading environments so that we can use our "iReaders" to read the ebooks we want to read wherever we want to read them.

In future posts we'll play plenty of attention to the two natural leaders in the field -- Apple's new iBooks Store and Amazon's Kindle Store. Each of these stores and their accompanying reading environments are available as free apps in the App Store that you can access directly from the Home screen of your iPad. You can also get into the Kindle App with your iPhone or iPod Touch, and I expect the iBooks Apps to become available soon on the iPhone or iPod Touch as well.

But just for today, with 180,000 apps in the apps store and not all that much navigational help to find them, let's focus on a pretty amazing, easy-to-use resource for serious readers who like a great selection of thousands of free books organized for easy sorting, searching, and browsing. It's called Stanza, and it is a free app that is available in the iTunes App Store, but it may require a little sleuthwork just because it is available now as "an iPhone app that you can run on iPad," kind of a second-class citizen of the app store and the iPad environment.


But once you type in "stanza" in the App Store search field, tap its "free" price field to download it, and then tap the Stanza icon to open the app, you'll be well on the way to seeing and using a reading app that is first-class in many respects. As with any iPhone app rendered on the iPad, you'll want to tap the 2X/1X toggle in the lower right corner of your overall display to expand the view to fill your 9.7" display. The resolution will then be not quite as crisp as if the app had been designed expressly for the iPad, but it's not bad.

When you first enter the Stanza app you'll find several basic navigational options: you can watch a pretty straightforward and useful help video if you tap on the "Watch Online Intro Video" link or the Stanza icon just above, you can start reading either if the two ebooks that are in your "Library," or you can tap on "Get Books" to see if this Stanza app really has books that would entice you to keep using the app.

The first two choices are great choices and I do recommend them, but let's go to the Stanza Bookstore, shall we? At the bottom of your display you'll see a "Get Books" icon second from the left. Tap that.

Stanza will then show you a listing of five bookstores in the first section, incluidng BooksonBoard, Fictionwise, O'Reilly, All Romance, and Smashwords. Each of them is well worth checking out with thousands of direct listings including O'Reilly's highly respected technology catalog and Smashwords' of titled by independent and self-published authors.

Then there are the free books, and that's where you are especially in a for a treat. Right away you'll notice there are several free listings from familiar major publishers: the "Random House Free Library," "Try Harlequin," and "Pan MacMillan Tasters" each has its branded free listings, but it is worth noting that the Pan MacMillan titles are not books at all but the same kind of free samples that you would fine for free in the Kindle or iBooks Store.

But those freebies are just the tip of the iceberg compared with what you'll find if you tap on Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, or Munsey's: thousands of free titles including the world's great classics, for searching, browsing, sorting and free downloading to your reading device, free and easy, just as Huck Finn would say. Alongside these listings, just for a little fun to get you started, you'll also see a link entitled "Now a Major Motion Picture!"

Okay, I've led you down the path and opened the gate. Now it's time for you to step in and do a little exploring -- and free reading -- of your own!