Apple has just announced that the iPad has collected 22 percent of ebook sales since its launch and is about to get new features too. A PDF viewer is going to be thrown into the iBooks app later this month, and will be accompanied by new bookmarking and note-taking functionality. Yeah, they’re basic enhancements at best, but we’re still trying to wrap our minds around this idea that Apple is already responsible for nearly a quarter of all ebook sales. Then again, as Steve points out, a cool five million of the darn things have been downloaded in the first 65 days of the iPad’s availability.
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Nothing like a little bad press to change corporate policy. Diane Campbell made US national news this week (seriously) when her attempts to purchase an iPad with cash were rejected. Apple’s no-cash policy (credit cards and debit cards only please) was put in place by Apple as a means of ensuring that customers were sticking to the two-device limit — a policy that was originally put in place in October 2007 in order to deal with high demand for the iPhone and, some would say, to keep the devices off the grey market. Well, some members of the US media got so feverish with affect rage that they lashed out at Apple with chants of “anti-American” and “anti-disadvantaged” (Diane is described as disabled and on a fixed income). Apple has reversed the policy: it now accepts cash just as long as customers sign up for an Apple account while in the store at the time of purchase. As for Diane, she got a free iPad and “changed a little piece of the world.” We feel safer already. Check the local news report video after the break if you must.

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Apple sold 8.75 million iPhones in the last three months. That’s over double what they did a year ago—the most quarterly ever—and how Apple nearly doubled profits: Up 90 percent for their best ever non-Christmas quarter. Updated live.

I presume what we’re all actually interested in, though, isn’t the iPhones they’ve already sold. It’s the one they’re going to sell in a few months. Apple likely won’t say word one about it on the live phone call that’s starting in 15 minutes—though the response to the first analyst to ask about it could be classic.

Update: They made $5.3 billion in revenue off all those iPhones, or an average of $600 per phone. Which is a huuuge chunk of the total $13.5 billion in revenue. And that growth, 131 percent over the year ago quarter, is insane. If you’re wondering what the most important product to Apple is right now, you can stop. Oh, and there’s a single mention of a “future product transition” that’ll impact margins. Guess what that is?

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Numbers released by Flurry Analytics yesterday suggested that Google’s Nexus One had sold around 135,000 units in 74 days (the same amount of time it took the iPhone to hit a million) — not a staggering number by any measure. Now, we don’t really have any way to assess the accuracy of Flurry’s data, but we spoke with Google’s team about a few things, and here’s what they had to say. For starters, Google wanted to assert the idea that selling lots of a single handset isn’t the company’s primary goal, an idea which makes sense considering how many handsets are currently available with Android. In our conversation, Google actually called out the sales figures for the Droid and seemed eager to make the point that their game is Read the full story

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The latest research from Gartner indicates that, for the year 2009, only 16 million app sales were executed on mobile devices not bearing the infamous bitten apple logo. In reporting this data, Ars Technica inadvertently conflates Apple’s latest announcement of three billion apps downloaded with the notion of three billion apps sold and pegs the App Store’s market share at a whopping 99.4 percent — but more realistic calculations still show it to be somewhere in the vicinity of 97.5 percent. Going off estimates (obtained by GigaOM) that a quarter of App Store downloads are paid-for apps, and taking a rough figure of 2.5 billion downloads in 2009, leaves us with around 625 million app sales performed by Apple, which Read the full story

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We may never know exactly why AT&T suspended online sales of the iPhone to residents of New York last night, but it doesn’t matter anymore — the site’s been updated and online sales are back… online. In other news, previously spiking sales of pants in the New York area have suddenly flatlined.

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