The Apple – Amazon War

Yes, it's about to get nasty. Apple with the iPad and Amazon with the Kindle. Sure the iPad does more, but is it necessary and does the public crave what the iPad offers. Time will tell, but the real story is the content war.

Last Christmas (2009), Amazon e-book sales overtook print for the first time ever. That's right, Amazon sold more e-books than printed books and much of those sales took place on Christmas day.

Why? Because people rushed to Amazon to buy e-books to read on their new Kindle e-reader gifts. 500,000 Kindle e-readers in fact. More than 9,500,000 e-books were ordered on December 14th alone. That's more than 100 orders a second. There are nearly 500,000 titles available in the Kindle Store.

Another important number. $2.5 Billion (that's with a B) is what Amazon is on track to sell by 2012. Getting back to Apple. Can you see now why the iPad becomes important to Apple. Not because the have a whiz-bang product, but they are heading into the iTunes territory but with the printed word.

The iBook Store aims directly at Amazon even though there are a lot of other players such as Sony with it's huge e-book inventory. Then there's eBooks.com, touted as the World's Leading Source of eBooks. This store has literally tons of books, no e-books, available, and when one considers the price (under $10), instead of the high priced paper versions, and the fact that you can carry around hundreds on one e-reader, you can easily see the future.

Another thing about e-books is the fact that you can get versions for mobile devices (smart phones), PDF versions and more. So it is no wonder that Apple and Steve Jobs see a huge market, not just for the iPad, but for the content.

Now if only newspapers and journalists could have their own store....