Excellent post by Thad this, read and think:
As you can see, Apple is missing half of the 10 titles on this week’s ebook bestseller lists (narrowed down to just self-published titles). That has to be troubling to Apple and its publishing partners. Apple and the big trade publishing houses could argue that the sorts of people who buy 99 cent ebooks aren’t iPad/iPhone owners. That would not be a clever argument. I would argue that after launching the iBookstore with great fanfare Apple is acting very much like a company that doesn’t much care about ebooks.
Barnes & Noble faces a different problem. None of the books here sells for over five bucks and yet Amazon manages to discount many of the titles from Barnes & Noble’s list prices, on average over a third off (of course it’s prices are lower still compared with Apple’s).
via Thad McIlroy – Future Of Publishing » Don’t Compare Specs, Compare Content.
Eoin Purcell's Blog 
Apple had its chance to make a mark in books and passed on it. iBookstore is just a Me-Too feature. If Apple ever wakes up, it’ll be too late. Amazon will be the only one standing with books.
Interesting post. I tried to comment there, but something seemed up with the site.
Apple don’t seem to care about selling books, other than to poke Amazon in the eye. The iBooks app wasn’t even shipped with the first iPads, and Apple only changed that policy when it became the most downloaded app.
Unsurprisingly, they don’t sell many books. That 100 million figure they have quoted (at two successive conferences, several months apart) includes free downloads. Not very impressive.
And it doesn’t surprise me, the iBookstore is a mess.
As to the rest of the piece, it doesn’t surprise me at all that self-publishers are underperforming (in relative terms) on Barnes & Noble and Apple. They make it difficult for us. Barnes & Noble don’t allow international self-publishers at all, and Apple require you to have an ISBN and a Mac – neither of which I want or need. In addition to that, they actively take steps to reduce the visibility of our books and keep us from their bestseller charts.
In short, Amazon makes it easy for us to make money, the others make it hard. And when we make money, the retailer makes money.