General iPad news

Steve Jobs opened his key note up with an introduction and an update on his beloved iPad. As of right now, there have been 2 million iPad sold since its first release in April — that’s one iPad sold every 3 seconds.

It’s available in 10 countries, but this number will expand to 19 by the end of this year.  Sales of the iPad has been touted to outpace that of a Mac.

iBooks & iBookstore

So far, iBooks, the ebook reader designed specifically for the iPad, has claimed a surprisingly large marketshare very quickly.

In it’s first 65 days of reception, there has been a total of 5 million e-book downloads — that’s 2.5 books per iPad. On top of that, 5 of the 6 biggest publishers who have their books on the iBookstore say that iBooks claim 22% market share in the ebook market in just 8 weeks.

Job also announced the following enhancements to the iBook reader:

• Highlighting: You can now highlight text on a page.
• Notes: Notes can be made on pages and look like a post-it.
• Bookmark: Bookmark a page by tapping on the upper right hand corner.
• Highlighting, notes, and bookmarks can be seen on a single page.
• PDF viewing

We’ve asked a couple dozen people how they felt about reading books on the iPad and their answers were very positive. Some people even said that while they haven’t read a book in years, they did so on the iPad.

iPad Apps

The iPad has another leg up over other ebooks: The App Store.  There has been a total of 35 million apps downloaded on iPads so far — that’s 17 apps per iPad.  iPad apps still lag behind iPhone apps greatly though: there are about 8,500 native iPad apps in the App Store.

Developers are also seeing great reception of their apps.

iPad app developer, Theo Gray, from Wolfram Associates was quoted by Jobs during the keynote, saying, “I earned more on sales of The Elements for iPad in the first day than from the past 5 years of Google ads on periodictable.com”.