February 2011 - Page 5 of 12 - Kindle Nation Daily

Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey Results: Kindle’s “Extra” Features Continue to Have Wide Usage

August 18, 2011February 18, 2011 by KND

(One of several Kindle Nation posts exploring the results of the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey. Click here to see a breakdown of results.)

By Tom Dulaney, Contributing Reporter

Jeff Bezos says the Kindle is and always will be, first and foremost, a dedicated ebook reader. And he’s right, of course.

But here at Kindle Nation we have been aware of the appeal of other features ever since our publisher Steve Windwalker hit the Kindle Store bestseller list back in January 2008 with the first “ebook” on how to use the Kindle for email. (The short piece later became part of the #1 bestselling book in the Kindle Store for the entire calendar year 2008.)

So, the Kindle may not be the ultimate convergence device, but readers do a lot more than buy and read ebooks on their Kindles. However, no other feature of the dedicated ebook reading tool compares to the book reading function in either usage or performance ratings.

The Kindle’s many other features find use and favor with scattered blocks of the 2,275 people who responded to the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey. Taken, together they are certainly part of the package of features that makes the Kindle the most popular ebook reader ever, and the most popular product ever sold by Amazon.

Presented here, arranged in order of usage and appeal with most popular first, are other Kindle features and our survey respondents’ ratings of them.

The three most popular non-ebook pastimes — newspaper reading, blog reading, and Kindles games — each come in with 35% to 36% of respondents.

Just over a third of respondents—a fraction under 36%–rated the Kindle for newspaper reading, and 8% say its performance is “superior” while 28% call it “useful, even if flawed.”

About the same percentage — 35% of respondents — subscribe to blogs that they read on their Kindles. About half of these Kindle Nation citizens read blogs nearly every day.

How well does the Kindle do in delivering blogs? Some 12% rate it as “superior” as a blog reader, while 20% find it “useful even if flawed” for a total of 32%. 57% of respondents saying blog reading is not important to them, 5% saying it’s a distraction, and 6% unaware of the feature.

Playing word games or using other Kindle apps and utilities occupies about 35% of readers, with 11% saying the use of such features on the device is “superior” while 24% say it is “useful even if flawed.” But 65% don’t play games for these reasons: 6% said “I was not aware of this feature,” 14% find gaming an annoyance or distraction; and 45% say it is just not important to them.

And one of our favorite features—sending personal documents and manuscripts to the Kindle—is used by 26% of all respondents, with 2% doing so daily, 6% weekly and 18% “sometimes.” About 21% said they were unaware of the feature, and 53% said they “rarely use” it.

Their ratings of the document reading feature: 25% find it useful even if flawed, and 9% rate the feature “superior.” About 53% said it was not important to them, 8% were unaware of the feature, and 5% found it a distraction.

The text-to-speech feature of the Kindle is used by a sizeable group of 25% of respondents, with 2% listening daily, 4% weekly and 19% “sometimes.” Two thirds—66%–say they use text-to-speech rarely. 8% call text-to-speech “superior” and 29% term it “useful if flawed.”

The Kindle gets significant use from owners checking email and browsing the web. In a question about usage, the survey combined email checking and web browsing. About 25% overall use the features, with 17% doing so “sometimes,” another 5% weekly, and 3% daily. And 56% said they rarely check email with their Kindles, while 19% were unaware that they could.

But that’s usage for email and web browsing. What about performance?

A second question broke out the Kindle’s two features: email and web browsing. For email, only 1% rate the Kindle “superior,” while 23% say it is “useful if flawed.”

As a web browser, only 2% rate the Kindle as “superior” as a web browser, and 28% call it “useful, if flawed.”

The survey combined two audio features to ask respondents how often they used their Kindles to listen to audiobooks and/or music. Some 12% listen to music or audiobooks on their Kindles, about half as many as text-to speech. About 1% listen daily, 3% listen weekly and 8 percent listen “sometimes.”

eBook Leaders Show Random House Sitting Pretty As Amazon’s Kindle Store Discounting Plays Crucial Role in Picking Winners

August 18, 2011February 18, 2011 by Steve Windwalker

By Steve Windwalker

For the past few weeks, we’ve been paying more attention than usual to the USA Today bestseller lists that come out each Thursday because they have provided a fascinating window into the changes that are taking places in what we read and the publishing sources for the books that we are reasing.

Once again, the USA Today top 50 list for the week ended February 13, 2011 shows a healthy representation of titles for which the ebook format is the highest-selling format. There are 19 such titles this week and we provide a full list of those 19 titles below, with their list prices and Kindle Store prices as of today.

For each of the titles listed here, the first price shown is the publisher’s list price as reported by USA Today, and the second, linked price is the Kindle Store price. Wherever the publisher is a participant in the agency-model price-fixing scheme, the two prices will often be the same. For other books, Amazon may discount the book further for Kindle customers at its discretion.

2. Alone Lisa Gardner, Bantam State (F) (E) $0.99 $0.99
3. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Stieg Larsson, Vintage (F) (E) $14.95 $5.00
4. The Girl Who Played With Fire Stieg Larsson, Knopf Doubleday (F) (E) $25.95 $5.00
5. Unbroken Laura Hillenbrand, Random House (NF) (E) $27.00 $9.99
6. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest Stieg Larsson, Knopf (F) (E) $27.95 $9.99
8. A Discovery of Witches Deborah E. Harkness, Viking Adult (F) (E) $14.99 $14.99
9. Water for Elephants Sara Gruen, Algonquin (F) (E) $14.95 $5.00
15. Cutting for Stone: A Novel Abraham Verghese, Knopf A (F) (E) $26.95 $5.00
17. Switched Amanda Hocking, Self-published through CreateSpace (F) (E) $2.99 $0.99
20. I Am Number Four Pittacus Lore, HarperCollins Youth (F) (E) $17.99 $9.99
21. The Confession John Grisham, Doubleday (F) (E) $28.95 $9.99
24. The Help Kathryn Stockett, Putnam (E) $12.99 $12.99
27. Ascend Amanda Hocking, Self-published through CreateSpace (F) (E) $2.99 $2.99
31. Torn Amanda Hocking, Self-published through CreateSpace (F) (E) $2.99 $2.99
34. Room Emma Donoghue, Little, Brown (F) (E) $11.99 $11.99
42. What the Night Knows Dean Koontz, Bantam (F) (E) $28.00 $9.99
44. Dead or Alive Tom Clancy, Grant Blackwood, Putnam (F) (E) $14.99 $12.99
46. Strategic Moves Stuart Woods, Putnam (F) (E) $12.99 $12.99
48. The Perfect Husband Lisa Gardner, Bantam (F) (E) $7.99 $5.00

While we are looking, a couple of other tidbits that caught our attention:

Among traditional publishers, Random House and its imprints are the place to be for authors these days. Random House is the leading traditional publisher in the U.S., and some

may have been nervous for its authors when Random decided to abstain from the agency-model price-fixing scheme and, in the bargain, from the much-hyped Apple iBooks Store. But Random and its imprints and authors have benefited hugely from the price flexibility that Amazon and other retailers have been allowed, especially since the publisher and the authors get paid based on full list price even if a title is discounted below wholesale cost in the Kindle Store and elsewhere. Sixteen of the USA Today Top 50 are published by Random and its imprints, which is a dominant position given other changes in the composition of he bestseller lists. Given that Random has achieved that position without a single sale through the iBooks store, that dominance speaks eloquently of the utter failure of iBooks.

Random imprint Doubleday, which means that Amazon controls price and discounting in the Kindle Store just as brick-and-mortar booksellers control price and discounting for the hardcover edition. But with Amazon selling the Kindle edition for $13.90, Jeff Bezos and his minions might as well be standing at the gates of bestseller heaven blocking the entrance of one of the more distinctive, independent voices to come along in American fiction in recent years. It says here that as soon as Amazon brings the retail price of Revenge down to the $5-$10 promotional price sweet spot provided for Stieg Larsson, Sara Gruen, John Grisham and others, it will have another bestseller in the making.

Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey Results: Kindle’s "Extra" Features Continue to Have Wide Usage

February 18, 2011 by Steve Windwalker