iPad Sales Stats Addendum

Here's an updated look at the iPad sales trajectory for the first "trimester" of its life (three sales quarters, that is). As you can see, it's a happy, healthy little guy, humming along nicely on his way to tablet market dominance: iPad sales currently account for 90% of all tablets sold worldwide, figures any corporate head would kill for.



But while Apple commands their corner of the field, Amazon is holding their own just fine in the eReader duel. I came across some facts today from the International Data Corporation corroborating the figures given in my last post, and adding an additional tidbit or two of data that I found informative. An IDC report from last week broke out the current market shares of dedicated eReading devices, with the top four being:

Amazon's Kindle (41.5%)
Pandigital's Novel line (16.1%)
Barnes & Noble's Nook/NookColor (15.4%)
Sony's eReader (8.4%)
Pandigital, really? They're outselling the Nook? Wow. That came out of nowhere. Or maybe I just wasn't paying attention. The most intriguing factor here, however, is that Pandigital comes loaded with the B&N bookstore as its default ebook source, meaning Barnes & Noble have prime placement on 31.5% of eReaders being sold. This, of course, doesn't mean they're selling that many ebooks, but it's got to help. In my December 11 post I reported the "Nook bookstore" share at 10.61%, with no mention of Pandigital in the picture. But then, things change fast these days.

One disparity came out in IDC's report, which is their estimate that 10.8 million eReaders were sold in 2010, considerably more than Gartner's 6.6 million count. In addition, IDC forecasts 14.7 million units to ship this year (up from Gartner's 11 mil) and 16.6 in 2012. As far as tablets are concerned, ICD rounds out 2010 with 17 million units sold (14 of which we know are iPads, so that sounds right), with a prediction for 44.6 shipping this year, which is just about what I came up with for all eReader devices combined. That's a whole lotta personal ebookstores opening up in the coming months, which is good news for ebook authors.