Apple recently announced that it will enter the digital textbook market. This is an interesting decision as it seems Apple is trying to get into a new profit pool. The above article states that Apple is trying to further increase demand for its popular iPad. Profit Pools are all usually about finding compliments to existing product lines. While expanding into Textbooks is not exactly a big compliment it does give people additional reasons to purchase/use the iPad (beyond just playing games and watching videos. This, in turn, drives up demand and should increase revenues for Apple.
Adding textbooks may not significantly increase iPad sales but it should increase total revenues of Apple overall. This is because the people who already have the iPad (for instance students and teachers) will now also consider purchasing their textbooks from Apple as well. Since these digital textbooks are relatively inexpensive to distribute and take little inventory space this could be a very good profit pool for Apple. Additionally, even though rival tablets like Amazon's Kindle also produce digital books there is little competition between the two for textbooks since the people who own iPads are unlikely to purchase their textbook for the Kindle when they can get it for the iPad instead and vice versa.
No comments:
Post a Comment