Take me to your Reader!
eReaders are getting a ton of press lately, and for good reason. Turns out people still like to read literature longer than 140 characters. While Kindle has made many people leave their dead trees at home, tablets have turned out to be a hidden favorite for eBook publishers and fans alike. In today’s post, we’ll take a shallow dive into how tablets are being used for book consumption.
My personal experience with eBooks started with Stanza on my iPhone. My wife became so concerned with her bleary-eyed husband that I received a Kindle over the holidays. It’s my constant companion on trips and even when dropping the kids off at school. The display is fantastic and easy on the eyes. Though I shudder when I do it, I still read content on my other devices, smartphone, and laptop included. Tablets offer similar levels of multi-tasking accessibility and are widely regarded as the “swiss army knife” of personal computing. They can do a lot of useful things when you need it even though specialized tools would serve you better. Given the broad utility, many people keep their tablet with them always and, in contrast to your swiss army knife, you can take it on the airplane with you.
Question is, for tablets, is the eBook experience the corkscrew (seldom used, but much talked about) or the scissors (not the reason you bought it, but the most-used feature) of the overall tablet experience?
We at Argus Insights can answer that question. Below
you’ll find our Segmented Attribute Funnel™ for the various tablet usage scenarios.
eBooks rank as the 4th most popular usage based on how customers share what’s important to their tablet experience. This puts eBooks out of corkscrew territory and squarely into the scissors category. If you look across the sentiment segments you find that even people that don’t care for their tablet (the No, AND segment) find that eBooks are still something to crow about. It’s interesting for the tablet market that users would rather curl up with a piece of aluminum and glass rather than listen to their favorite music.
The tablet is the latest device in the battle for convergence in consumer electronics. As we can see from the data, like swiss army knives, these devices converge around different usage scenarios based on what customers are looking to do and the device capabilities. Dedicated eReaders may still have a place in this market but with a different flavor of convergence where eBooks are their “big blade” and web surfing becomes their corkscrew. Argus will start covering eReaders in the coming weeks to answer that question as we rely on user wisdom to decide which experiences deliver on the promises of delight.
bigheadted
June 8, 2011 @ 6:24 pm
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/08/explaining-kindles-success-its-very-simpleminded/