Apple's Latest Plan To End Amazon's E-Book Dominance Is Showing Progress
Amazon may be the leading e-book publisher out there, but Apple's iBook platform is threatening to unravel its dominance.
Since Apple released iOS 8 in September, the company has added a million new iBooks customers every week, according to Apple's iBooks director Keith Moerer.
Apple's decision to pre-install iBooks on both iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite has contributed to its tremendous growth.
About 70% of Apple's mobile devices are using iOS 8 now.
Apple's phablet-sized iPhone 6 Plus may also be encouraging customers to try iBooks.
Moerer said at a conference on Thursday that the company was seeing more people downloading books on their phones since the latest iPhones came out.
This is some positive news for Apple's ambitions in e-books. In 2013, the company lost the first round of an antitrust lawsuit that alleged it conspired with publishers to fix the price of electronic books at a higher price than Amazon had been selling them for. A federal judge ended Apple's alleged price-fixing and forced the company to pay a $840 million fine.
Apple is appealing that decision and thinks it's in the right.
In December, Apple exec Eddy Cue said he'd "do it again" in reference to Apple's iBooks strategy.