The iPhone May Be For Reading But It’s Still Not Great For Novels

For the first time there are more e-books than games in the iPhone app store, reports the Guardian (UK). Books now outnumber game apps 27,000 to 25,400–and the paper says that e-books are “gathering momentum” in anticipation of the iPad.

Publishers find this exciting.

“The iPhone has always been perceived as a games-centric device,” Dan Franklin of Canongate told the Guardian, “so the idea that books are outranking games is very exciting.”

“It’s a very exciting time,” agreed Jeremy Ettinghausen of Penguin. “It’s very exciting that people are using iPhones to read books.”

I seriously doubt this is an indication that the iPad is the savior of the reading world. What it probably means is that, proportionally, there are more people using Apple devices to read the news than there are people who use it as a gaming platform. That’s pretty unsurprising. Games were always marketed on Apple products as an icing-on-the-cake feature.

The primary role of, say, the iPhone, for example, has more to do with communication and information. I have a few games on my iPhone but I barely play them. In contrast, I have tons of news and information apps on there (The New York Times, Reuters, Politico, Le Monde and I’m really excited about TPM’s app). But that doesn’t mean that my iPhone is my primary reading platform —my computer is I suppose. I’m pretty sure I’m a standard example of iPhone users. Maybe that will change with the debut of the iPad. But for the moment this news just means that people are using the iPhone for reading, not that they are reading Russian novels on there.

—Daniel Strauss