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iPhone's killer app: E-books?

Electronic books are finding their way onto the iPhone at an ever-increasing pace. Who knew the killer app for a phone would be a book?

Dave Rosenberg Co-founder, MuleSource
Dave Rosenberg has more than 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to startup IPOs to open-source and cloud software companies. He is CEO and founder of Nodeable, co-founder of MuleSoft, and managing director for Hardy Way. He is an adviser to DataStax, IT Database, and Puppet Labs.
Dave Rosenberg

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica took a look (slides below) at the developers behind the most successful applications on the iPhone and found that electronic books may be the killer app, simply because there is a such of wealth of offerings.

According to ReadWriteWeb, Apple's App Store features about 40,000 different apps. Based on recent data, game developers have on average, 2.3 apps in the store while typical e-book vendors have 18 apps, which obviously stacks the odds in their favor.

What's interesting about this is that this news suggests that the iPhone really is a new breed of mini-computer in that people are using it for passive activities such as reading as well games and for interactive tasks such as e-mail.

Books are also currently the fastest growing category in the App Store up 285 percent in the last three months.

For the record, I use a Blackberry Curve as my main device and own an iPod Touch.

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