Amazon-owned Kindle rival reveals iPhone app stats

Kindle market being eaten by iPhone?

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15 July 2009 17:53 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Amazon-owned Lexcycle has announced that its Kindle-rivaling iPhone app has seen considerable success.

As well as two versions of the Kindle ebook reader on the hardware front, Amazon also offers a Kindle iPhone app, so a direct rival to the "Stanza" application offered by Lexcycle, a company Amazon bought in April 2009.

It's been revealed that more than two million users have downloaded Stanza since it was launched a year ago while book downloads via the free app have reached the 12 million mark.

These figures could be considered high enough to show that there is a market for reading books on mobile phones (with large enough screens) and is interesting to consider the future of the ebook reader market as phones offer larger display and more sophisticated applications.

Amazon is famously reluctant to reveal Kindle statistics of any kind, so its unclear how these figures from Lexcycle stack up against its parent company's rival offerings, and whether the iPhone in particular is eating into the Kindle's market.