Books Now Outnumber Games on the iPhone
People love their iPhone apps — after all, Apple has sold over a billion of them since it launched the phone. And a big proportion of those apps are games. But you know what else a growing number of people love to have on their iPhone? Books.
Context & Ripple Effects
When GigaOM asked where the iPhone games were back in July 2007, gaming on the platform was barely a question mark; by August 2009 it dominated iPhone app sales while Android skewed toward utility apps. This piece marks another turn in that arc: within Apple's billion-app catalog, books have now overtaken games by count, signaling that the iPhone is becoming a mainstream reading device and not just a plaything.
The timing is pointed. As of this writing Apple has reportedly begun shipping iPads to stores for staff training ahead of the device's launch, with TV ads said to be imminent — both still unconfirmed rumors, but ones that frame the book-vs-game crossover as groundwork for a dedicated reading tablet rather than an accident of catalog growth.
First-order effects
- Publishers and e-book app makers gain a proven mass-market distribution channel on the iPhone, since reader apps now represent the largest app category by count on a platform with over a billion downloads sold.
- Game developers, who owned the platform's narrative from 2007 through 2009 per the sales data cited here, now compete with reading apps for the same home-screen real estate and download dollars.
Second-order effects
- Apple enters direct conflict with dedicated e-readers' business models: if books thrive on a phone people already carry, standalone reading devices face a substitution argument at exactly the moment Apple is prepping a larger-screen alternative of its own.
- The crossover pressures Apple to treat books as a first-class storefront category alongside music and apps, shaping how the App Store merchandises content versus utilities.
Third-order effects
- If reading keeps migrating onto general-purpose phones, the market structure splits between single-purpose e-ink readers and multifunction screens, forcing publishers to price and format for both rather than betting on one device class.
The trend: The smartphone is absorbing discrete media categories — games first, then books — turning app catalogs into the primary battleground for every form of published content.