Amazon and Apple To Battle Over Book Market

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - 09:54 by Simon Crisp

It seems as though online retail giant Amazon is in store for one of the biggest battles of the year. The eRetail site could well be on track for a confrontation with electronics titan Apple as they compete for the cash of those doing safe shopping online everywhere. Specifically, this relates to online shoppers who are into the latest gadgets. Apple is set to release its much talked about iPad at the start of next month and some experts believe that the new entrant could make a significant dent in profits made by Amazon's Kindle reader.

Whilst the Apple iPad is a touch-screen, tablet style mobile computer with a host of functions, the fight is likely to be fiercest between the two firms when it comes to selling books-e-books, to be precise-online. Both the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad sell or will sell electronic versions of books.

Amazon sells e-books from its website, for customers doing their safe shopping online to download for a price. And when Apple releases the iPad on April 3rd, it will also offer e-books, from the Apple iBookstore, with something of a price war expected, as Apple is allowing publishers to determine their own e-book prices, while Amazon sets its own prices. Apple is expected to encourage some fairly aggressive prices to set the iPad apart from Amazon's offering.

The iPad is certainly expected to make a splash, with many experts predicting huge sales figures for the device: one analyst from Macquarie Equities forecast that 2.5 million iPads will sell in 2010, whilst another from Barclays Capital said that five million iPads will be sold. These figures may prove off the mark, but on paper they certainly seem impressive, particularly when compared to the three million Amazon Kindles that have been sold since the device launched a few years ago. The stage is set.