Tablet, e-reader ownership doubles over Xmas
Volumes of demand
Tablet and e-book reader ownership almost doubled in the US over Christmas.
Think-tank the Pew Research Centre spoke to a thousand or so grown-ups in the States this month and discovered that while ten per cent of the adult population owned an e-book reader in December 2011, in January 2012 the figure had risen to 19 per cent.
Coincidentally, tablet ownership also increased from ten per cent of the adult population to 19 per cent in the same period.
Source: Pew Research Centre
While tablets have, over time, been acquired by more and more Americans, that's not the case with e-book readers, Pew found. Ownership of these devices increased through to May 2011, reaching an adult population share of 12 per cent.
But during the latter part of 2011, ownership declined to ten per cent, as measured by Pew in August 2011 and December 2011. Back then, it looked as if the tablet was indeed pushing the e-book reader out of the public eye.
We'd say the low cost of e-book readers - Amazon's Kindle has never been cheaper, and other vendors, such as Sony have cut prices too - pushed up ownership through Christmas presents. Will recipients make use of their gifts - or spend their own money on a shiny, colour tablet as soon as they can?
Pew's numbers show tablet ownership to be pretty much equal across gender and race lines. Unsurprisingly, the more folk earn, the more likely they are to own a tablet. Ditto, the better educated they are, though these factors are closely tied.
It's mostly the same demographic story with e-book readers, though there's a slightly higher female ownership. The mid-line of the curve above the age bands is also closer to the middle of the chart - tablet owners tend to be young to middle-aged.
A recent survey conducted in the UK by pollster YouGov put the post-Christmas e-book reader ownership at 2.5 per cent on the adult population here.®
COMMENTS
Tablets makes for poor ereaders and I don't understand why they keep getting lumped together.
Poor statistics
These are really poor numbers. They asked 1000 people and guessed that it was representative of 228,000,000 (2008 population)?
Then they say about a 3% drop from May to August? Let me guess; they asked different people?
On a quick poll of my office, I can tell you that 83.3% of the world's population is male...
As a cheap techy present...
...people have been buying them as gifts without checking whether the person actually wants/needs them in the first place. i wonder how many will remain unused, gathering dust ... there is one in my house that will, and Amazon have been handed a damning e-mail to tell them exactly why ... it's useless. Can't handle PDF's with any grace, the buttons are too close together (especially to, "nudge" display contents) ... and other stuff.
Waste of money. I'd have been happier with a box of tights.
My partner and I got his parents' old Kindles for Xmas.
They're not computers, and they don't do everything, but they are very useful.
I thought at the time that a lot of old Kindles would be getting passed on - the early uptakers for the Kindle seemed to be older people that weren't that worried about the specs. In our case, the APs were happy to replace the slightly heavier and larger Kindle keyboards - they don't miss the extra storage because they keep everything on Amazon's cloud anyway and delete from the Kindle once they've finished reading and they didn't use the text to speech and audio functions anyway.
I seem to remember that the new Kindles are selling at below cost-price, and if so, that's not a bad move for them, because now where there were two people in the potential market for ebooks, there's now four, although all my books come from Project Gutenberg, and my partner only uses his for pdfs (which display OK, if a little clunky).
@Michelle
May one inquire - Is it a Kindle or a Fire which is so useless?
