350,000 Textbooks Downloaded From Apple’s iBooks in Three Days

Though nascent and unproven, Apple’s new textbook initiative appears to be gaining lots of momentum — and quickly, too.

Within days of its debut, Apple’s iBooks textbook store had already racked up a significant number of downloads. Same thing with the company’s textbook authoring tool. According to Global Equities Research, which monitors Apple’s iBook sales via a proprietary tracking system it doesn’t much care to discuss, more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded from the company’s iBooks Store within the first three days of availability. And there were some 90,000 downloads of iBooks Author, Apple’s free textbook-creation tool, during the same time. If those numbers are accurate, Apple’s textbook effort would seem to be off to a good start. Which is good news for everyone involved — particularly textbook publishers, who stand to make more money on books sold through iBooks than those sold at retail.