Amazon To Launch App Store For Kindle

As Apple is rumored to announce its Tablet next Wednesday, Amazon will announce its App Store for Kindle this Thursday, according to The New York Times. The store will contain so called ‘active content’ for the Kindle,  which may be considered similar to Applications in Apple’s App Store. Amazon will have the common revenue share model, sharing 70% with developers and keeping 30% for themselves.

Although the Apple Tablet is likely to be a very different device than the Kindle (color screen, higher refresh rate etc.), the two devices are still likely to compete with each other. Both devices are mobile and have a screen large enough to read books. Already, books have been very popular on Apple’s App Store: in December, there were 19,697 apps in the Books category. This is the second largest category on the App Store, right after Games. What’s most interesting however is the high percentage of paid content: 92%.

However; have these books been successful? From our data, we can see that only about 1% of the applications in the Top Overall have been Books (December 2009). That’s a strikingly low number. This may be caused however by the fact that it is hard for single book titles to compete with e.g. Games, as these Games usually cater to a larger audience than one specific book.

We will update appstores.info when Amazon launches the Kindle store.