Apple by the numbers: 100M iPhones sold, 100M iBooks downloaded, $2B to devs

During Apple’s press event for the iPad 2 today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed some impressive new statistics: Apple has sold 100 million iPhone as of last week, users have downloaded 100 million ebooks via its iBooks store, and it just recently surpassed $2 billion paid to app developers through its App Store.

The news means Apple sold around 30 million iPhones since the end of the fourth quarter of 2010, when Apple sold a total of around 73.5 million iPhones. As for the iBooks numbers, it’s certainly impressive, but Apple was clear to point out that it’s referring to download numbers, and not sales. Given that Apple offers free ebooks from Project Gutenberg, they could easily have accounted for a good number of those downloads.

Apple’s $2 billion payout to developers is also significant. Not too long before Apple’s event, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata shared his thoughts on the gaming industry’s problems at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. He criticized the huge development process for many console games today, which he said has led to a loss of the finer details in game creation. Meanwhile, Apple is finding success with small and focused mobile games, and mobile developers are reaping huge paychecks from it.

Jobs also announced that book publisher Random House will be bringing over 17,000 books to iBooks. Apple now has over 2,500 publishers in its iBooks store.

Another interesting number worth considering: Jobs said that Apple just recently crossed 200 million Apple ID accounts across its three stores, iTunes, iBooks and the App Store. “Now Amazon doesn’t publish their numbers, but it’s likely this is the most accounts with credit cards anywhere on the Internet,” Jobs said.