Firstly, thank you to everyone who voted in my little e-book versus p-book survey!
The reason I set up this poll was that I wanted to know how many of you read paper copes and how many have embraced the new digital form of reading. When I first posted the survey, it became immediately clear that many people wanted to vote both for e-books and traditional paper copies. I should have of course known this, since I’m a multi-user myself….but I thought I was a little weird. But it turns out that 90% of you are just like me!
This result can obviously not be taken as a reflection of the population at large – my poll is far too small for this. It can also be said that people who read blogs online are far more likely to also read fiction in the same way. Still, I think it’s interesting to find that there are so few exclusively e-book or p-book readers amongst my sample.
As far as what kind of e-readers are popular within this sample, Kindle came out as the most used. Some 47% of you are reading Kindle as opposed to 26% iPad and 5% other e-readers.
While I was waiting for the results of my survey, something fairly dramatic happened in the book trade. Yesterday Waterstones (a large book retailer in UK) announced that it was going to start selling Amazon products. ‘The fox has been allowed into the chicken coop.’ was one commentator’s view of the deal, while Harry Wallop from The Telegraph wrote,
‘What many people fail to realise is that the book market is not split down the middle between those who buy physical books and those who buy digital. Most digital purchasers still buy ink and paper books, especially when it comes to children’s books and history.’
This nicely echoes what I found in my survey. Now all we need to do is make sure e-books are sold in traditional bookshops. Easy peasy lemon squeezy? (More about this to follow)
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