Like E-Books? Amazon Sells More of Them, For Less, Than Apple. For Now

The introduction of the iPad and the iBooks store has lots of people forecasting doom for Amazon’s Kindle. And Citigroup’s (C) Mark Mahaney, an Amazon bull, acknowledges that Apple (AAPL) will eat into the Kindle’s share: He’s convinced, quite reasonably, that Amazon needs to overhaul the Kindle very soon, and cut its price below $200, to stay competitive.

That said, Mahaney points out that Amazon (AMZN), with its long-established relationships with publishers, still offers book buyers a wider selection of e-books than Apple does. And it sells its books for less. From his note published Friday:

• 88% of NY Times Fiction and Non-Fiction Best Sellers are available on Amazon’s Kindle vs. 63% being available in Apple iBooks;
• The average price of the Best Selling eBooks available on both platforms is $11.23 on the Kindle and $12.31 on the iBook platform – a 10% difference;
• All in, about 50% of NY Times Fiction and Non-Fiction Best Sellers are available on both the Kindle and the iBook platform; and
• For the eBooks available on both the Kindle and the iBook platform, 80% had the same price, whereas Kindle prices were cheaper for 20% of the books by an average of 11%.

Those gaps will narrow over time, assuming that Apple pushes hard with publishers to do so. And assuming it does, the real difference for buyers ought to be: Do you want to read e-books on a multipurpose device (the iPad)? Or one that costs a whole lot less, and does much less as well (the Kindle)? My guess is that even after Apple eats into the Kindle’s share, Amazon is going to find plenty of people who just want an e-reader. We’ll see..