E-Book Reader Owners – A Small But Important Market Segment
The strategy adopted by Amazon of setting the price for Kindle books at $9.99 or lower has led to some tough discussions with many of the major publishing firms. Very recently, this even had the effect of causing books by the McMillan publishing house to be withdrawn from the Amazon website. The dust has settled and McMillan books are now being sold by Amazon again. The publishers may have managed to secure higher pricing for their books, for the moment at least, but they need to tread carefully and avoid upsetting customers.
The fact that the Kindle reader is now Amazon’s number one selling product is clear evidence of just how quickly the public have adopted e-book readers. Apart from the Amazon Kindle, there are now numerous alternative readers available from the likes of Sony, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Plastic Logic – the list goes on. The market may well be new, and in a developmental phase, but it is growing rapidly.
E-book reader owners may well be in the minority at the moment – and this is likely to be the case for some time to come – but they have already begun to form an extremely important market segment within the industry. Think about it – would you buy an e-book reader if you read a book a month? The owners of e-book readers get through a lot of books.
They are also likely to have a relatively high disposable income – or else why would they spend over $ 200 on what is after all a discretionary purchase? They are probably well educated – or at least well read – and they are quite likely to be aware of new trends and topical issues. In short, they are the target market for book publishers and booksellers.
They will certainly be aware that it costs much less to produce an e-book than it does to produce either a hardback or paperback book. They also know that e-books – even taking the materials used to produce the reader hardware itself into account – are much more environmentally friendly than paper books. They will probably enjoy the speed and simplicity with which they can purchase new books using the e-book reader. Some of them may even find themselves buying and reading more books than usual as a result of this. When they are enjoying a good book, they probably don’t even notice if they are using the Kindle reader, the Nook from Barnes and Noble or leafing through a leather bound first addition. It would be a major error if publishers or booksellers were to disregard these early adopters of e-book reader technology.
However, that may be just what many of these publishers are in danger of doing at the moment. Many of the major publishing houses are keen to defend the profits they make from the sale of hardback books. For this reason they have pressurised book retailers to fix the price of e-books higher than they might otherwise have wished. In the short term, this may prove to be a good strategy for protecting the publisher’s profits – but profits aside, there is very little apparent reason to take this step, something which must be blatantly obvious to many consumers.
Check out the Kindle reader and view the wide range of Kindle accessories available to help you customise and protect your reader.
Tags: books, ebooks, electronics, product reviews, reading, technology