Introducing the Perpetual Self-Updating Book
Posted by admin on September 23rd, 2011
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As I’m writing this column, there are currently 466,302 mobile apps available for the iPhone and 512,542 mobile apps available to download on an Android phone.
Combined with all of the apps for Blackberries, Windows 7 Phones, and other smartphone platforms, we now have over 1 million mobile apps available for download.
Putting this into perspective, the whole mobile apps revolution began in March of 2008 when Steve Jobs announced the software developer’s kit for the Apple iPhone. When Apple’s App Store officially opened on July 11, 2008, there were a whopping 552 apps to choose from.
To say the apps were an instant success is a gross understatement. Over 60 million apps were downloaded within the first 3 days and tech companies around the world began to sense a market shift. Little did they know how much, and how many industries would be affected. As of today, over 20 billion apps have been downloaded and there’s no end in sight.
Sometime next year, the number of mobile apps will exceed the number of books in print – 3.2 million. This is an interesting comparison to make because both books and apps are information products. Can a book be an app? Or an app be a book?
Here’s where it gets real interesting. Perpetual self-updating books that function as a book-app hybrid may seem like the tiniest of narrow niches, but I predict this will become one of the most lucrative niches of all in the entire publishing world.






