The Apple App Store is enormous and growing at a pace that that reaching certain milestones often goes by with little to no fanfare. Last month, Apple Chief Executive Officer, Steve Jobs mentioned at the Apple iPad launch party that Apple had over 140,000 different applications in its App store and that in excess of 3 billion consumer downloads had been completed.

That was last month. According to Distimo, the number of applications now exceeds over 150,000 of which 75% are paid applications while the remaining 25% are free downloads. Compare that to another popular store, the Google Android Marketplace where over 60% are free applications available to Android users.

Another interesting point however is the iPad is a tablet that Apple hopes will corner the market on book readers. In order to do so however, they will need a strong library from which Apple users will be able to download material. In this respect, the app store is doing very well with over 27,000 book apps, 92% of which are fee based downloads. This should make the new iBooks application even more enticing for readers.

It remains to be seen how well the iPad performs in a market that has been the domain of the Amazon Kindle and its e-ink technology. From Amazon’s perspective, it appears that they are planning to meet the new competition head on and there are rumors that a free Amazon Kindle may be in the works for some of their subscribers.

Via: Tech Crunch