Today’s e-book power buyer—someone who buys an e-book at least once a week—is a 44-year-old woman who loves romance and is spending more on buying books now than in the past. She uses a dedicated e-reader like a Kindle instead of reading on her computer.
In a panel this morning, the Book Industry Study Group announced these and other new stats from its Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading survey:
-E-books currently make up around 11 percent of the total book market. The percentage of print book consumers who say they download e-books more than doubled between October 2010 and January 2011—from 5 percent to almost 13 percent.
-Women make up 66 percent of e-book power buyers. In 2009, they didn’t even make up half of e-book customers (they were at 49 percent of the e-book market).
-Most e-books sold (58 percent) are fiction, with literary fiction, science fiction, and romance each comprising over 20 percent of all e-book purchases.
-“Power buyers” represent about 18 percent of the total people buying e-books today, but they buy 61 percent of all e-books purchased.
-The most influential factors leading to an e-book purchase are free samples and low prices.
The Book Industry Study Group is the U.S. book industry’s trade association for policy, standards and research. Data for its Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading surveys is provided by Bowker PubTrack Consumer, which surveys a new group of 3,000 respondents about their book-buying behavior each month
