Gadgets We Love

IPhone Steals Lead Over Kindle

Andy Greenberg and James Erik Abels writing in Forbes 10.02.08

It's official:

The iPhone is more popular than Amazon.com's Kindle.

And not just in the obvious categories like listening to music, browsing the Web or the other applications where Kindle barely competes. Now, the iPhone is also muscling into Amazon's home turf: reading books.

Stanza, a book reading application offered in Apple's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) iPhone App Store since July, has been downloaded more than 395,000 times and continues to be installed at an average rate of about 5,000 copies a day, according to Portland, Ore.-based Lexcycle, the three-person start-up that created the reading software.

By comparison, Citigroup estimates Amazon will sell around 380,000 Kindles in 2008. Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey expects Sony's (nyse: SNE - news - people ) Reader will sell only a fraction of that number. In other words, Apple may have inadvertently sold more e-readers than any other company in the nascent digital book market.

For the full Forbes piece link here.