Tablet, e-reader ownership doubles over Xmas 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 …
...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.
..that Apple have brought out a new ebook format, which includes a lot of "Whiz-bang" stuff that won't run on any other reader?
I admire the attempt to attract more people to their platform with carrots rather than sticks, but they appear to have missed the fact that a lot of users prefer their media to not be locked to one vendor or product...
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...
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My story; bought my partner a Sony eReader for Christmas last year. She uses it all the time, you don't need to take your charger on holiday, you can read it on the beach. This Christmas she got an iPad, I got a new Sony eReader. Much the same device, but cheaper, with a touch screen, wifi etc. . I've still got my netbook, which does for me. Ereaders do one thing very well, so I can't see them going away soon.
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).
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