Analysts predict that Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) will sell as many as 48 million iPads this year, about four times as many tablets as Amazon is expected to sell, based on projections for the Kindle Fire. Both the iPad and the Kindle Fire were hot sellers during the holidays, and now Apple is working hard to keep the Fire from spreading to the enterprise and education markets ahead of the iPad. Apple has successfully marketed the iPad to corporate giants ranging from GE to Hyatt Hotels, and a report out last week showed the extent to which IT professional are relying on iPads to get their work done.
The education market has always been an Apple stronghold, and now Apple is trying to solidify iPad’s position with the launch of iBooks 2 and a partnership with McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the three companies who dominate the United States textbook market. Although digital textbooks accounted for less than 3% of the $8 billion US textbook market in 2010, according to Forrester Research, Apple believes the iPad can change that by offering a better platform for reading e-books than anything schools have seen to date. But the iPad is far from indestructible and it remains to be seen whether cash-strapped school districts can commit to outfitting their students with tablets that will almost certainly be dropped broken and stolen on a regular basis.
But if downloads of Apple’s e textbooks are a leading indicator of iPad sales, the outlook is positive. Analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research estimates that customers downloaded approximately 350,000 iBooks from Apple’s iBookstore during the first three days that the books were available. “Our research indicates that Apple has a very strong following with Authors, Publishers, Faculty and Students and may capture 95% of the digital textbook market, while Amazon.com may only participate in 5% of the market,” Chowdhry wrote in a note to clients.
