E-book buyers favour iPad over Kindle and co. Punters out to buy an e-book reader seem set on Apple's iPad, a survey of 3171 US consumers has revealed. According to market watcher ChangeWave Research, 40 per cent of folk planning to buy an e-book reader in the next three months said they'll go for the iPad. Amazon's Kindle was the second most popular device, selected by …
How do you like your eggs?
The way I don't like them.
Most people genuinely don't know what they want. The real proof will be one year after the launch of the iPad when someone does a study of the number of books read by an average iPad users (or at least iPad user who bought it planning to use it as an ereader anyway) vs average Kindle/Reader user.
User experience will encourage reading on dedicated ebook readers and discourage it on iPad.
You mark my words (most ebook readers allow annotations, after all)....
Err, how about reference stuff, fiction versus non-fiction, some light reading just before you go to bed versus serious literature earlier in the evening? Or maybe even the morning paper during the commute?
And for one particular application: I would have killed for an e-book reader when I was in Field Service. Ditch the crate full of manuals, the box of microfiches and the reader, for a single A4-pad sized device? You bet.
Most of you sound like boys of eleven being dismayed that your 14 years old friends aren't interested in your games anymore because they're after girls and other more grown-up things now and just can't be bothered. Shame on them! Suckers! Hey, let's play with our PCs a little bit more! Or smell a book! Maybe there're girls in one of them.
I don't know if I should laugh or cry when I see people reading and busily commenting on an article they read on a computer screen and then -- praising books and telling me that I can't possibly read on a LCD screen. I read 8 hours a day on a LCD screen and then I read a book for one hour or three on another LCD screen and I'm still not blind.
And let me tell you, I'm sick of PCs and computers. Give me something that lets me surf the web and read things and play games without even having to think about the OS and files and whatnot and I will gladly use it whenever I can. Which won't be all of the time but every minute not wasted with all too visible technology counts. It was interesting for the first ten or twenty years but all of this has been getting quite a bore for some time already.
Kindle = Great ebook reader. Suitable for reading a book in bed as if it was a real dead tree.
iPad = Tablet PC. Probably going to be great at everything except late night reading in bed.
Until all the hype is over the Apple_Anti_Fan_Club will buy Kindles and Apple groupies will buy iPads and pretend they can read iBooks on them until they need iGlasses due to iStrain.
And millions of normal people will look at it objectively and end up with both, one next to the bed and one in the briefcase/backpack.
The biggest problem with iPad is flash. Flash is a blight on the face of the internet that we would be well rid of, but at the moment any tablet without flash is almost useless as a web brower. Add to that the conflict of interest between flash and the iStore and Apple have a very difficult juggling act ahead of them.
A number of posters have made the difficulty of reading books on shiny screens. They are undoubtedly right. However will quite happily use my iPod Touch and Stanza to read a book when on holiday or waiting at the doctors surgery. Brilliant? No. Seviceable as part of a general purpose device? Yes. And that's with a tiny tiny screen.
I wonder if the figures reflect the fact that people are interested in a general purpose device that is 'good enough'. .... Typed on my iPod. Not the ideal text entry tool, but handy and good enough.
Hm, I'm working in IT for close to 30 years now, I don't know how many years I spent reading on various types of screens. Just now I'm reading on a glossy Macbook Pro sitting on the couch with a window to my left and it's a sunny day. Am I blind already or just less sensible than others?
the iPad will be shiny...the iPad is all over the place - glossy magazine, TV adverts, even hogging free TV advertising from state television by way of 'news' (it wasnt even out, it was just announced FFS!)
however, the people surveyed.... were they given the option of a 'limitless budget?' - as another poster pointed out...were they given price as a part of the puzzle?
Sony, Amazon and B&N have devices which are poorly advertised...but are, on the other hand, ideal for what they were designed for - e-book readers are meant to allow you to read without the damage and strain of a backlit display. and they do that very well. the iPad wont (and cant) compete as an ebook reader.....it'll be interesting to see the average books/device for the ipad over the year after its release - i believe most people will use the ipad as a plain tablet-shaped netbook. casual web browsing on the sofa, and getting RSI from typing out too many emails on a fairly hard surface.
"Web browsing, email and e-book reading are the top three favoured applications, chosen by 68 per cent, 44 per cent and 37 per cent of potential iPad buyers, respectively"
So they arn't wanting an e-book reader then are they! They want a moble web surfing device that also does email. The survey must have missed out the part about watching TV and movies since it seems to me that is what the iPad is best suited for.
If you want an e-book reader then you would be stupid to get an iPad since it has a LED desplay so it similar to looking at a computer screen. What you want is an ePaper device so it is easy on the eyes.
And of course if you ask people what they plan to buy they will mostly respond the name of the next device that is coming to market, if they wanted to buy a device that was already available they would have already purchased it.
How about this for a title for your next article:
100% of e-book readers prefer Kindle over iPad.
At least this would be true since no-one can prefer a device that doesn't exist yet.
Although I have slight concerns about reading on an LCD, if I'm going to use an e-reader I'm going to use my HD2 phone (with the AlReader erm... reader).
If I want to browse the web or be useful and mobile I'll use a netbook over the ridiculously useless (if slinky) iPad.
If I want to pay wayyyy over the odds I'll get either an iPad, or a Kindle, and actually buy eBooks!
I have no idea what your trying to say, must have got lost somewhere between your love of the ipad and...somewhere else.
So %37 of the %40 of people are actually looking to buy an iPad to use as an ebook reader? What is %37 of %40 anyway. %40 =400 out of 1000? people surveyed so only 148(%37 of 400) out of this 1000 people are interested in the ipad for it’s e-reader functionality.
How does that equate to ebooker fans looking to buy a ipad over a kindle. Also you note that MORE THAN A QUARTER (%27) would buy an iPad had it been available but ONLY %45 (ffs) would buy the same device again, you fail to mention what this %45 percent already own, all got Kindles perhaps, who knows since you didn’t bother to mention the fact.
all i get from this is people looking to buy something that will cover multiple tasks they might need would achieve from a portable device get and ipad or netbook, but someone with a budget looking for a good ebook reader is not going to be one of them. So the title makes no sense.
Apart from the fact that they only interviewed a remarkably small number of people for this "survey", I assume that a large number of them had yet to experience any sort of eBooks from the numbers given. Thus in no position to say they preferred one system over another.
Secondly, the iPad is not an eReader in any real sense, it is merely a smallish computer in a different box, and so far as reading is concerned it is the same as any other computer, and suffers from all the faults that caused eReaders to be developed so slowly and painfully over the last few years to address those problems.
Personally I find it unhelpful at the least for the so-called advanced tech thinkers at Apple to attempt to sell the thing as an eReader. Lets see them create a true eReader before we mention Apple in the same breath as devices such as the iRiver, the Onyx, the....... the list is long and full of increasingly interesting devices,, all of whom are excellent devices to read books on, and all the other functions they have are secondary to this main function.
I hate the almost religious aura surrounding Apple, and am in a sort of a way pleased to see that they are as capable of producing lemons as any other company out there.
Surely the title should be 'A percentage of few thousand possible ebook buyers are waiting to see what the IPAD is actually like shocker'. Although it is a bit long.
Those that really want an ebook will more than likely have one already and so wouldn't be polled.
I didn't know you were owned by Apple now?
I wonder - are these "real" book readers or occassional browsers?
I can't for the life of me think of a reason anyone that reads more than say 5 hours a week and preferably more than 1 hour at a time would want an iPad.
I think the commenters above have it right - "who're they calling an e-book buyer?"
From my perspective, I am in the market for a ebook reader but the price gap between a kindle dx and an ipad is basically non-existent. If the ebook readers want to hit their sales out of the park they need to come down in price to become a commodity, not a niche device.
The ipad (and I won't be buying one) is a much more useful device for a similar price point. Where's the pricing differentiation?
Anyone who has compared reading on a screen or pda with a proper ebook reader will tell you that what makes them so much better is the e-ink screen. The difference is so dramatic that there is no question of the ipad matching it. So anyone who says they want an ipad obviously hasn't actually compared them and is either going to use it in ignorance or be sorely dissapointed.
All this survey really shows is that hype works and a lot of morons will buy anything wrapped in a shiney package.
but no way in hell am i paying ludicrous amounts of cash for one.
my Nokia N97 along with MobiReader does a darn fine job so far, and I have no intentions of buying a dedicated reader until the price has dropped to sub £50-75 for the current market offerings (which is what my belief for such a device should be valued at)
I realise this may be a couple of years in the making, but you should also take into consideration that the technology will have moved on by then and newer/better units will be available.
I may come across as a tightwad, but as a married man with 2 children, there is no way that i can justify spending what amounts to the same as an entry level laptop on a 'book with lights'.
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