The New iPad

On April 8 (Thursday), the Mashable site reported here that Steve Jobs had made an announcement at Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 press event.

Jobs reported that 450,000 iPads had been sold and 600,000 iBooks downloaded.

The operative words in that statement are "iBooks downloaded." Note: that isn't iBooks sold.

You'll recall that on March 26th here, I posted that the Apple iBookstore would include free offerings from Project Gutenberg.

Project Gutenberg is a digital library of books in the public domain.

So it's perfectly possible that those 450,000 new iPad owners each downloaded one or two free e-books--just to get the feel of what reading a book would be like on their spiffy new device.

Hey, Steve Jobs, come back when you want to tell us how many iBooks Apple actually sold.