iBooks sales, by the numbers

January 18, 2011 2:51 PM

Are Apple's iBookstore "Top Charts" lists published anywhere on the web?

It seems like they're only available from inside the iBooks app, which is rather inconvenient for people without an iOS device (like some authors I know).

I did find one mysterious, half-broken site that looks like they're scraping Apple's data somehow, but they only capture the top 20, and, as I say, are pretty broken looking. Seems like an abandoned hack.

This data is available to anyone with eyes and an iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch, so even if Apple isn't publicizing it themselves I rather assumed that someone would be collecting it, making charts and graphs, writing articles, and generally paying attention to the inside baseball of epublishing in the iBookstore. In searching, however, I'm not even finding people asking about it, which makes me wonder if I'm asking the right question in the first place.

posted by mumkin to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Well, one month and no joy. I've exchanged some emails with the guy behind iBookAllStars, the site I mentioned above. It's not an abandoned project, apparently, just moving slowly, on what amounts to a public staging server.

So, I'm still looking for a source of web-accessible iBookstore ranking data. It'd be nice if it were historical, but really, even something like the Amazon Kindle Bestsellers would be welcome. Please share if you stumble across anything.
posted by mumkin at 8:48 AM on February 19, 2011