.gif)
E-Readers Boost Demand For EBooks
By Anna Johnson on January 26th, 2010New media hasn’t killed, and won’t kill, the printed word… well, the electronically printed word anyway! Recent research from L.E.K. Consulting indicates that buyers of ebook readers or ‘e-readers’ tend to read more books (i.e. ebooks) than they otherwise would, and are hungry for new media content of all forms.
According to L.E.K. Consulting’s second annual ‘Hidden Opportunities in New Media Survey’ of more than 2,000 households, 44 percent of e-reader owners increased their new media usage in the last year.
Ebook reader owners were hungrier for new media content than both iPod/MP3 player owners (16 percent of which increased new media usage in 2009) and social media/Facebook users (19 percent of which increased new media usage).
For example, while iPod owners consumed about 9 hours of new media per week, e-reader owners consumed more than 18 hours a week, in the last year.
L.E.K. Consulting estimates that 1 out of 10 Internet users now owns an ebook reader (such as Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Nobles’ Nook) and with more companies marketing or building ebook reading devices of one kind or another, this number is certain to grow.
According to Dan Schechter, vice president and media and entertainment practice head for L.E.K. Consulting:
“The fact that Amazon sold more Kindle books than printed books on Christmas Day 2009 speaks volumes. We’ve dubbed the 10 percent of consumers who own an e-reader as the ‘E-reader Republic’ and think that it is a potential goldmine for content providers and advertisers alike.”
Moreover, L.E.K.’s research reveals that almost half of e-reader users increased their consumption of books, and more than one-third of their consumption was incremental, indicating that books were sold that would not have been sold as traditional print books.
