Two interesting studies and one new iPhone/iPod Touch app surfaced this week. Herewith my musings about them.
Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading (BISG)
The Book Industry Study Group released the first of what they promise will be three major studies for 2010. There were 556 survey participants (all of whom indicated they had purchased an ebook or owned a dedicated e-reader). Here are the pertinent findings released by BISG in their news release (to get all the details you’ll have to buy the $149 report):
- 30% would wait up to three months to purchase the ebook edition
- 20% have quit buying print books in favor of ebooks
- 28% said they would “definitely” purchase an ebook with DRM
- the most popular reading platform is the computer (47%) followed by the Kindle (32%), with the other e-readers filling in the remaining 21%
- 81% purchase ebooks only “rarely” or “occasionally”
Time Spent Viewing Online Video Up 13% in December (NeilsenWire)
This study by The Neilsen Group surveyed online video sites and sources. Here are a few details:
- viewers watched 13% more minutes of online video (2009 vs 2008)
- number of unique viewers increased 10% (2009 vs 2008)
- Number of streams viewed per viewer increased only 1.4% (2009 vs 2008)
- In December 2009, 137.4 million unique viewers watched 10.8 billion video streams
- On average in December 2009, each unique viewer watched 2.48 minutes of video streams
- The top two video sites were, not surprisingly, YouTube and Hulu (with YouTube accounting for almost 10 times as many video streams and unique viewers)
Txtr app lets you read Adobe-DRMed ePub on your iPhone or iPod Touch (Teleread)
Not owning an iPhone or iPod of any kind, I can only report what David Rothman of Teleread has said about the new Txtr app for those devices. However, I think it is a good thing. People should be able to read their ebooks on any platform they want, particularly the ability to read the same book on their desktop, dedicated e-reader, and smart phone.
You can do that today with Amazon Kindle books, thanks to their iPhone/iPod Touch app and the new Kindle for PC desktop app (with a version for the Mac supposedly in the works). It would be great in Amazon would upgrade all the Kindles so they could display ePub, too (DRM or not). After all, the Kindle is the number one dedicated e-reader on the market (see first item above).
Overall, I think all of the above helps those of us in publishing and writing to focus our energies.
Ebooks are still gaining popularity, although I expect the phenomenal growth curve to flatten considerably sometime this year or next. Despite all the hype about the number of book apps downloaded by iPhone and iPod Touch owners, those devices did not even make a mention in the BISG study results. I suspect that most of the apps (book-related and otherwise) downloaded to those devices are the result of people thinking “how cool” but not really following up by using them a lot.
The study results on online video are also interesting. I think we at Slipdown Mountain Publications LLC really need to get our act together on that front. I’m still not very thrilled with the concept of a book trailer, as such, (I’ve watched a lot of them and not one has ever spurred me to buy the book) but I think there are a lot of other opportunities to connect with potential readers via video.
