Movies.app Is Acquired. Who is Going to Grab Books.app?
With Amazon on its recent acquisition spree, one might think they would be the number one candidate to snap up the mobile ereader books.app and its for-pay-cousin BookShelf. That is until you consider books.app is all about the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle don’t play nice together. Amazon won’t touch it. That leaves the field wide open for another large company to buy up this app pronto. Will it happen? I doubt it.
Indigo Books, B&N, and Borders need to start selling ebooks before this would make sense for them. Harper Collins is doing its own thing over at mobile.harpercollins.com. Random House and Penguin have the cash (and the need) but I don’t think they buy other companies and other technologies as a regular thing. CBS-owned Simon and Schuster would be my best guess. CBS has been on an acquisition tear of their own lately. First they bought LastFM and then cNet. Someone in their headoffice knows what is what. Simon itself has shown that is willing to take a flier on bookvideos.tv. And they could use the iPhone help too.
But do any of these companies even see books.app as opportunity? That is hard to say. Movies.app may have been the first iPhone app to sell, but it sold to Flixster, not to a big congolmerate. Similarly books.app is more likely to go to a startup than a big player.
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