App Store now has 35,000 publishers

Popular Iceberg Reader Apps

Twilight Curious George The Lovely Bones The 48 Laws of Power Letters to Penthouse Iceberg BookShelf

Expensive Iceberg Reader Apps

$69.99 The Sushi Experience $129.99 Kaplan MCAT $219.99 Kaplan USMLE

Wondering how much would it cost to buy every one of the 168,747 Apps in the US App Store?$483,082.61

The pace of new publishers entering the App Store continues to accelerate, and today the total number of publishers selling Apps in the US App Store hit 35,008. Despite the flood of newcomers, the App Store is increasingly dominated by a handful of publishers that account for an enormous share of the total available Apps. This hyper-consolidation skews simple measurements that attempt to gauge trends in the App marketplace.

For example, the App Store hit a significant milestone earlier this month when "Books" eclipsed "Games" as the category with the most apps. This is a big deal because historically the App Store has been dominated by Games, and it seems simple to infer that App developers are creating more Book Apps. We looked at the data, however, and discovered that this trend has been driven almost entirely by a single publisher: Iceberg Reader.

Iceberg has created more Apps than any other publisher, and by an astonishingly wide margin. With over 8,700, Iceberg has twice as many Apps as Brighthouse Labs - who is in a distant second place. And since Iceberg Apps are all Books, we can credit this single publisher with swinging the proportion of Games vs Books. Furthermore, few people are buying what Iceberg is selling. Less than two dozen of their Apps are even in the top 400 most popular.

Price is likely the reason why so few of Iceberg's Books are popular. In addition to being the most prolific publisher, Iceberg is unusual in that its apps are expensive, at least by App Store standards. The average price of an Iceberg App is almost $14.50, compared to an average of only $2.86 for the App Store overall.

So if you were to drop almost half a million dollars to purchase all of the Apps, you'd be spending over $126,000 of that cash on Iceberg Reader.

Complete iBookstore Categories

iBookstore structure

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• Arts & Entertainment (6)
  • Art & Architecture
  • Games
  • Music
  • Performing Arts
  • Photography
  • Theater
• Biographies & Memoirs
• Business & Personal Finance (10)
  • Careers
  • Economics
  • Finance
  • Industries & Professions
  • Investing
  • Management & Leadership
  • Marketing & Sales
  • Personal Finance
  • Reference
  • Small Business & Entrepreneurship
• Children & Teens (2)
  • Fiction
  • Nonfiction
• Comics & Graphic Novels (2)
  • Graphic Novels
  • Manga
• Computers & Internet (9)
  • Computers
  • Databases
  • Digital Media
  • Internet
  • Network
  • Operating Systems
  • Programming
  • Software
  • System Administration
• Cookbooks, Food & Wine (8)
  • Beverages
  • Courses & Dishes
  • Methods
  • Reference
  • Regional & Ethnic
  • Special Diet
  • Special Occasions
  • Specific Ingredients
• Fiction & Literature (13)
  • Action & Adventure
  • African American
  • Classics
  • Erotica
  • Gay
  • Ghost
  • Historical
  • Horror
  • Literary
  • Literary Criticism
  • Poetry
  • Religious
  • Short Stories
• Health, Mind & Body (4)
  • Health & Fitness
  • Psychology
  • Self-Improvement
  • Spirituality
• History (11)
  • Africa
  • Americas
  • Ancient
  • Asia
  • Australia & Oceania
  • Europe
  • Latin America
  • Middle East
  • Military
  • United States
  • World
• Humor
• Lifestyle & Home (4)
  • Antiques & Collectibles
  • Crafts & Hobbies
  • Gardening
  • Pets
• Mysteries & Thrillers (6)
  • British Detectives
  • Hard-Boiled
  • Historical
  • Police Procedural
  • Short Stories
  • Women Sleuths
• News
• Nonfiction (5)
  • Family & Relationships
  • Philosophy
  • Social Science
  • Transportation
  • True Crime
• Parenting
• Politics & Current Events
• Professional & Technical (5)
  • Design
  • Education
  • Engineering
  • Law
  • Medical
• Reference (12)
  • Almanacs & Yearbooks
  • Atlases & Maps
  • Catalogs & Directories
  • Consumer Guides
  • Dictionaries & Thesauruses
  • Encyclopedias
  • Etiquette
  • Foreign Languages
  • Quotations
  • Study Aids
  • Words & Language
  • Writing
• Religion & Spirituality (7)
  • Bible Studies
  • Bibles
  • Buddhism
  • Christianity
  • Hinduism
  • Islam
  • Judaism
• Romance (7)
  • Contemporary
  • Erotica
  • Fantasy, Futuristic & Ghost
  • Historical
  • Short Stories
  • Suspense
  • Western
• Sci-Fi & Fantasy (2*)
  • Fantasy (5)
    • Contemporary
    • Epic
    • Historical
    • Paranormal
    • Short Stories
  • Science Fiction & Literature (3)
    • Adventure
    • High Tech
    • Short Stories
• Science & Nature (10)
  • Astronomy
  • Chemistry
  • Earth Sciences
  • Essays
  • History
  • Life Sciences
  • Mathematics
  • Nature
  • Physics
  • Reference
• Shows & Periodicals
• Speakers & Storytellers
• Sports & Outdoors (15)
  • Baseball
  • Basketball
  • Coaching
  • Extreme Sports
  • Football
  • Golf
  • Hockey
  • Mountaineering
  • Outdoors
  • Racket Sports
  • Reference
  • Soccer
  • Training
  • Water Sports
  • Winter Sports
• Travel & Adventure (10)
  • Africa
  • Asia
  • Canada
  • Caribbean
  • Essays & Memoirs
  • Europe
  • Latin America
  • Middle East
  • Specialty Travel
  • United States

Since we first starting analyzing the eBook data for the upcoming Apple iPad, we've watched the category list change a number of times. Originally, it was almost identical to the structure of Audiobooks in the iTunes Store. The list we present here has been stable for a couple of weeks, but we wouldn't be at all surprised to see it change again before the iPad launch on April 3rd.

It's important to emphasize that this list is not definitive and completely subject to change. It represents our best guess given the most recent App Store data provided by Busted Loop.

In the complete data set there are a few categories we omitted because they are duplicates, and aren’t expected to stay in the list when the iBookstore goes live. For example, the data shows another top-level category for "Self Development", but we suspect this section has been superseded by the "Self-Improvement" sub-category within "Health, Mind & Body". The rest of the omitted categories are: "Fiction", "Classics", "Drama & Poetry", "Languages", "Sports", and "Technology". On the right is a preview of the complete structure of eBooks, including all of the sub-categories.

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Apple's eBooks will be much more organized than Apps

 

Apps for 3G iPad only

TrakPal V2 iSatFinder Coordinates CycleTracks iNomad Found in Haiti Locate Me! GPS Meeting Point

When Apple's eBook Store opens next month iPad owners will have a lot of categories to browse. Clues derived from Busted Loop's App Store data indicate that eBooks will be divided into more than 150 sub-categories. This robust classification scheme is quite different than that of the App Store, which has only 19 sub-categories for games.

Apple eBook sub-categories will be organized within 20 to 30 top-level groupings. That's similar to the top-level organization of Apps in the App Store. It's also about the same number of categories that there are for Audiobooks. In fact, a few of the new eBook categories are identical to categories found in Audiobooks. Most, however, have been enhanced and expanded. For example, Audiobooks has a category for "Business", whereas eBooks will have "Business & Finance".

Many of the eBook sub-categories are very specific, for example:

• "Manga" in "Comics & Graphic Novels"
• "Special Ingredients" in "Cookbooks"
• "Etiquette" in "Reference"

There are also two separate sections for "Erotica"; one in "Fiction & Literature" and another in "Romance". It's unclear whether these sections will offer different types of Erotica, or will just be separate paths to browse the same material.

The eBook category for "Sports and Outdoors" has the most sub-categories, owing to separate classifications for 15 different sports (including "Mountaineering"). Other categories with extensive sub-categorization are "Fiction & Literature" (13), "Reference" (12), and "History" (11). The "Computers & Internet" category is also among the most segmented with 9 sub-categories including "Digital Media", "Network", and "Programming".

In the run-up to the iPad release in April many Apps are being certified as iPad compatible. Right now just over 10% of all Apps now this designation. "iPad WiFi" and "iPad 3G" are flagged separately, but in almost every case the Apps are compatible with both.. A small subset of Apps (around 50) are compatible only with the 3G version, and they all rely on GPS functionality.

App Store Category Combinations

Weather Games

Weather IQ Best Storms Jigsaw

News Games

Guess the News Celebrity Trivia Obama! Jumbler

Navigation Games

Road Slot GPS Mission Earthslicer Eye-Hound The Hidden Park kubalo GPS Easter Egg Hunt Hide and Seek with GPS

With over 165,000 apps available in the iTunes App Store there's a lot of variety, but there's also a lot of duplication. Many apps are clones of other more popular apps. In the interest of App discovery, we examined some uncommon categorizations for games in the App Store and present the results in this article.

First, a bit of background: Apps can be listed in multiple categories, and most are. Games are usually included in two game-specific categories (like "Arcade" or "Puzzle") in addition to their primary category. By analyzing the permutations of these categories we're able to slice up the vast universe of games into smaller segments, which allows for more detailed browsing. For example, on the right is a pie chart with the distribution of Word Games in the iTunes App Store.

Weather Games

The rarest type of game in the App Store is the weather game. In fact, there's only one that has real weather substance (two if you count the Celsius and Fahrenheit versions), another is a jigsaw puzzle with a weather theme. There are six other apps that are listed in both Weather and Games, but they aren't real games¹

News Games

Compared to Weather, the News category has twice as many apps that are also in "Games", however most of them aren't actually games. There are about two-dozen apps that appear in both "News" and "Games". In this category the four apps that are actually games are all trivia.

Navigation Games

With less than 10 real games, Navigation is the second least common category. All of the games are quite new, and all of them leverage the iPhone's GPS-capabilities.

Business & Finance Games

The next three least common game categories are Business, Finance, and Medical. Almost all of the business games have something to do with "fun meeting jargon" - only one, Millionaire Tycoon, is a real game about business. Finance games, its no surprise, are mostly pretend stock trading, along with one kids game to teach piggy-bank skills, and a handfull of "Financial Bailout" spoofs.

Medical Games

Only slightly more common than "Business / Finance Games" are "Medical Games". There are unexpected apps like "Stool Scanner", and more traditional games including lots of quizzes (anyone up for a game of Speed Angiology), but there are also a few action games, like Dr. Nano- 3D Artery Adventure.

1  To explain what is a "real game", it's easiest to explain what it is not - And that's easiest done by example. One app excluded from Weather Games is Aurora - Northern Lights - That just isn't a game at all.