MC2 Post 839 The Most Popular Way to Read an E-Book Is …

Link:  http://m.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/and-the-most-popular-way-to-read-an-e-book-is/

TinyURL:  http://tinyurl.com/2cgu5hr

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From  http://m.wired.com

And Now The Metrics:

Amazon’s Kindle has become the breakthrough e-reader since it was introduced only three years ago, fueling a nearly $1 billion business that Forrester Research says will triple in the next five years.

But it is edged out by the humble laptop as the e-reader of choice, according to a Forrester survey released Monday. 

Laptop users could very well be reading Kindle editions on a computer using software provided by Amazon, and may be motivated to merely avoid a third device (assuming a phone is also a necessary one). But the choice may be very interesting to Google, whose “Editions” e-book service (which was supposed to launch this past summer) would be an entirely web-based store, requiring no special device or software.

Laptops only slightly trump the Kindle, 35 percent to 32 percent. Coming in third was the iPhone, with 15 percent, followed by a Sony e-reader (12 percent), netbooks (10 percent) and the Barnes & Noble Nook (9 percent). Also at 9 percent was the iPad. In what is either great or awful news for the vendors of e-readers, half of the respondents said they had borrowed a book in the last six months. This is barely possible with a Kindle or a Nook, which lets you “lend” a book once, for only two weeks — forget about it on any other platform. And it would seem that borrowing

the old-fashioned way hasn’t gone out of style: 38 per cent said they checked a book out of a library. An equal number said they had bought a book from a chain store.

For all of the hoopla only 7 percent of U.S. online adults currently read e-books,

Forrester found. Among those who don’t, 8 percent said they expected to in a year — which means the audience would double. And once readers taste digital, they rapidly convert from print, Forrester said — asked what proportion of the books they expect to read a year from now would be e-books, the current e-book readers in the survey gave an average of 51 percent.

And it is this metric which prompts Forrester Analyst James McQuivey to speculate that e-books will be a $3 billion business by 2015, “a point at which the industry will be forever altered.”

And the biggest winner in the e-book sweepstakes? Forrester says it will be … the Kindle.

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