Two Minute Survey on eBooks

With the growing popularity of devices such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eBook reader, plus mobile applications to read electronic texts, this is a year in which eBooks may have finally arrived in the mainstream. In this Two Minute Survey, we want to know a little bit about your eBook reading activity and preferences for reading digital texts.

The survey will open for a week starting Monday October 5 and will be published a week later. Again, this survey is very quick! Take two minutes and then forward this URL to a friend.  (image credit: Flickr CC Licensed Photo by antonio.tombolino)

The Questions:

1. How many eBooks have you read this year?
2. What is the primary device on which you read electronic books?
3. What would you feel comfortable spending for a single eBook ($US)?

The Results (view full spreadsheet)

We recorded 217 people having completed this survey. Let's look at the results..

The largest response to the first question indicates 38% of the respondents have not finished reading an eBook this year, including people who don't read electronic texts, or people who just have not finished one. Looking then at the people who have read an eBook this year, a quarter of our survey participants have read between two and five titles this year. And while it is a small percentage (11%), it is interesting to note the numbers that have read more than 10 eBooks. 

We might expect for this numbers to change next year if we run the survey again; these devices are likely to be popular holiday gifts.

For the devices, people use to read eBooks, most readers (37%) in our survey use their computer:

The Amazon kindle has the next highest usage (25%) which is higher if you consider the 14% who use a Kindle on a mobile device. Between the Kindle and Stanza, and a few mentioned under "other", mobile eReader devices are used by a quarter of our survey participants. In the "other" responses were:

• None/not applicable (13)...  "eBooks are brain-dead as currently constituted" "I don't read electronic books! Scandalous, isn't it?"
• Other iPhone app (4) BeamItDown, playshakespeare.com, Eucalyptus, Classics for iPhone
• too expensive (2)
• I read books in print / I hate to read online (2)
• All of the above
• B&N eReader
• PDA
• Waiting

Probably the most interesting responses were in the third question where we tried to gauge where people feel eBooks should be priced:

The majority of respondents (60%) expect eBooks to be priced well below the price of a paperback book or even lower amounts. In fact, less than 10% feel that an eBook price should be in the price range of a print version.