News & Trends: eBooks ... By the Numbers

E-books on the Cheap
The Price Wars
The average prices of the top 100 e-books on the Amazon Kindle best-seller list and the Sony best-seller list for the first half of 2009 were $8.26 and $10.38, respectively. For the second half of 2009 (up to mid-December), the average price for the top 100 Amazon Kindle titles dropped to $6.76, while Sony's average price dipped to $9.25.

E-book READERS
How Much Do They Read?
Among e-book users, 63% have read between one and five e-books in the past year.

E-books in Any Format
Who's Reading?

• The largest group of e-book readers are in the 18–25-year-old age range, making up 25% of e-book readers. (The percentage/group size drops as one moves into the older age ranges.)
• Four out of five e-book users read their e-books on PCs or Macs (mostly PC). About one in four read e-books on a device other than a PC or Mac, including dedicated reading devices ?or smartphones.

Adult Consumers and E-books
Read vs. Buy
U.S. Adult Population Purchasing E-books: About 90% of the U.S. adult population has never purchased an e-book.

U.S. Adult Population Reading E-books: About one in five (20%) adults has read (not necessarily purchased) at least one e-book in the past 12 months.

The E-book
A Manly Format?
The e-book format is the only reading format statistically known to draw more men than women: About 12% of men bought an e-book in the past 12 months compared to almost 9% of women.

Source: All statistics provided by Simba Information (SimbaInformation.com) from its “Trade E-Book Publishing 2009 Report and Book Publishing Report.”