BISG Reports Accelerating Migration to eContent

From their recently released report on Consumer Attitudes to eBooks:

“This is a market in fast motion and identifying trends early is the key to gaining a competitive edge,” said Scott Lubeck, BISG's Executive Director. “This on-going BISG baseline study of consumer behavior toward e-books and e-book reading devices is essential to understanding both the velocity of change and its significance to every stakeholder in the book industry.”

Some of the specific results show:

• Fiction continues to dominate downloads, with literary fiction, science fiction, and romance each comprising over 20% of all format purchases.
• The most influential factors leading to an e-book purchase are free samples and low prices.
• “Power Buyers” (respondents who indicated that they acquired e-books at least weekly) have moved away from computers to dedicated e-readers and tablets much faster than the overall pool of respondents.

Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading also explores the use of e-book reading devices. Current results indicate the emergence of a bifurcated market, with preference for e-reading devices such as Kindle and NOOK as devices of choice for most fiction readers, while the iPad and other tablets are preferred by those engaging in more interactive types of reading that includes charts, graphs and multimedia.

The report is available from BISG here.

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Bangkok: Wat Benchamabophit 1971

Bangkok: Wat Benchamabophit 1971

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.
Little has changed here from this view taken in 1971 and today. As with many of these images from our family history, it is interesting that I traveled years later to the same places but never recalled the first visits. This is the Interior courtyard at Wat Benchamabophit, also known as the marble temple.

Flickr set.

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Looking at Kindle Pricing: Shift of Kindle Bestsellers Towards Price Extremes

Dan Lubart of Iobyte Solutions has been working with several publishers on the mechanics of eBook marketing and selling. He's begun to promote his work on his website and his analysis of Kindle pricing is throwing up some interesting data. Here is a recent post (Blogsite):

This chart shows the number of titles on the Kindle Bestsellers list that fall within each of four selected price bands each day. The shift of the market towards premium titles (over $10) and super-discount titles (under $3) is significant of late. Even since the disruption of March 1st when Random House went agency and repriced a number of bestsellers from $9.99 to $12.99, the trend has continued. Our working hypothesis is that as the increasing number of books in the super-discount band become available, that segment of the buying market will continue to congregate there. What follows is that the remainder of buyers as a segment are less price-sensitive than the entire market was, resulting in stronger support for premium priced eBooks as opposed to value priced eBooks (under $10).

* Totals may be less than 100 on certain days due to exclusion of games and other non-book titles.

Today there are 35 super-discount titles (below $3) and 40 premium titles (above $10). Three months ago (1/8/11) those numbers were 26 and 19 respectively. Part of this shift is explained by the Random House change on 3/1, but the trend has been strong since then. Both of the middle bands have lost 6 titles each since 3/2.

Iobyte's eBook MarketView tool enables publisher, authors, agents and other interested parties to study the dynamics of the eBook retail marketplace in various ways. For more information, please email us at info@iobyte.com

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