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In a sudden moment thousands of Apple fanboys give up books and add Amazon.com to their list of mortal enemies
Watch for the announcement of a book burning party at your local Apple StoreÂ
One can only read into this statement as a directive from the supreme leader of the Ministry of Fruit. Its a good thing the New York Times is there to set the record strait:
“…when Mr. Jobs was asked two weeks ago at the Macworld Expo what he thought of the Kindle, he heaped scorn on the book industry. ‘It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,’ he said. ‘Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.’
To Mr. Jobs, this statistic dooms everyone in the book business to inevitable failure.
Only the business is not as ghostly as he suggests. In 2008, book publishing will bring in about $15 billion in revenue in the United States, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association.
One can only wonder why, by the Study Group’s estimate, 408 million books will be bought this year if no one reads anymore?
A survey conducted in August 2007 by Ipsos Public Affairs for The Associated Press found that 27 percent of Americans had not read a book in the previous year. Not as bad as Mr. Jobs’s figure, but dismaying to be sure. Happily, however, the same share — 27 percent — read 15 or more books.
In fact, when we exclude Americans who had not read a single book in that year, the average number of books read was 20, raised by the 8 percent who read 51 books or more. In other words, a sizable minority does not read, but the overall distribution is balanced somewhat by those who read a lot.
If a piece of the book industry’s $15 billion seems too paltry for Mr. Jobs to bother with, he is forgetting that Apple reached its current size only recently. Last week, Apple reported that it posted revenue of $9.6 billion in the quarter that spanned October to December 2007, its best quarter ever, after $24 billion in revenue in the 2007 fiscal year, which ended in September.”
In my opinion, Steve Jobs is the last person on earth who should be ragging on another industry/company about market share. Â