On 12/11/2012 11:40 PM, a@aboq.org wrote:
On Tuesday, 11th December 2012 at 22:31:32 (GMT -0800), James Adcock wrote:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/devices/article/54705-ki...
Note that this report says that only 6% of readers use their computers to read ebooks. Another 6% use an iPhone or a smart phone.
This is a good example why Mark Twain was right when he said that there are 3 kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.
And this report is a good example of why this is true, and why knowing the methodology and raw data is A Good Thing. For example, the summary at bowker.com also states that "The ... Bowker-powered survey shows that tablets have risen by about 25 percent over the past year as the first choice for respondents’ e-reading device, while dedicated e-readers have fallen by the same amount." Wow, that must mean that Kindle's share has actually fallen substantially. Well, not actually. The Kindle Fire is grouped with "tablets" and not "dedicated e-readers." And neither the Bowker summary nor the PW rehash gives actual absolute numbers. It may be that non-Apple/Amazon/B&N tablets are also growing in popularity, but their percentages of the whole are skewed by the Amazon marketing juggernaut. And the preferred file format for these various devices has been totally ignored. Most interesting to me was the fact that Bowker bases their conclusions on "what is currently happening with e-book ‘Power Buyers.’ Their e-book purchasing and e-reader preferences have proven to be reliable predictors of market trends,” said Angela Bole, BISG’s Deputy Executive Director. In other words, Bowker has not attempted to capture device popularity, or capability, but only the preferences of those people who /buy/ e-books--and who buy lots of them (people who I often derisively label as "having more money than brains"). I can't remember the last time I /bought/ an e-book--it was probably about as long ago as I read anything downloaded from Project Gutenberg. I read e-books voraciously, but if I can't check it out from my library I just don't read it. There are plenty of other things competing for my attention. This is, I think, consistent with Project Gutenberg data favoring the ePub format to the .mobi format; people who buy commercial e-books from major online retailers are not the same people who are downloading e-texts from PG. Different demographics, different levels of sophistication, different conclusions.