Interesting - The Kindle Really DOES Have A Market

Old people.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/04/old-people-love-kindle.html

"We extracted about 75 percent of the responses on age (representing about 700 responses, taking equally from the earliest and most recent postings, which show very similar age distributions). Per John Makinson's quip at an LBF panel, over half of reporting Kindle owners are 50 or older, and 70 percent are 40 or older. Here is the full age bracket distribution:

0 - 19: 5%
20 - 29: 10%
30 - 39: 15%
40 - 49: 19.5%
50 - 59: 23%
60 - 69: 19.5%
70 - 79: 6%
80+: 2%"

and the lighting of the thing that makes it so easy to read.

Plus it's really, really light.

I rarely buy books, though I have several periodicals on subscription. I manually upload open stuff and things I translate with Mobi.

I love mine at the old age of 43.

Just because you're 40 or older doesn't mean you're "old".

:cry:

That's like.... everybody. With a card at least.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Haven't purchased a paper book other than a magazine in almost a year.

with the amount of reading each group does. yah think?

you have to enjoy reading to buy a kindle.

However, E-paper readers have advantages. For example, a student could download textbooks to a reader, thus saving them from the strain of lugging around 20 extra pounds of dead tree pulp. My kid has CP and she suffers a lot of pain due to weighty textbooks.

and you have to like books to buy an e-reader.

will have more capabilities.

Kindle DRM has been cracked for a while.

But I am talking about e-readers in general. The Kindle isn't the only one and eventually, the price as well as the DRM bullshit will be worked out in the marketplace. As for the bulk, one e-reader as opposed to several heavy books is better.

I thought it was a great idea for the last 20 years. The technology is certainly up to the task, but the textbook publishers haven't wanted it.

They can't bilk buyers for nearly as much money as they can with hard-copy books.

She's 62.

I'm 30 and still like going into Barnes and Nobles or Borders pursuing the shelves of books and still love the feel of turning pages.

:shrug:

sounds like a pretty wide market actually. Of course if you don't like to read or are illiterate it probably won't be much fun.

marks on them, circle interesting words, hi-light them, buy several copies of the first editions if I think they are worth collecting, and make them mine.

As a writer, it's also a depressing thought that books might one day only be in E-form. I'm not against e books and have had books published in that form, but to me the real golden egg is producing a three dimensional book.

I believe they can co-exist and will come to respect each other

;)

I just have no interest in the kindle specifically.

I'm interested in the percentage of readers, period, who prefer hard copy to ebooks. That's all.

That's the pertinent point and bottom line, because this is deep down a corporate discussion about money, but it will have repercussions for writers, obviously.

I hated to but have since cut that down to a few hundred stored while I am working on the road. I worked for a bit testing for NAEP (NCLB) and one of the questions we asked the kids was how many books they have in their home. I was aghast, dumbfounded, incredulous to learn that very few people have more than a handful of books at home if any.

I've made it my mission to be the crazy aunt that buys kids books for their birthdays and holidays. I see too many parents now that don't have the money for books OR the time to take their kids to the library. It's sad.

we really benefited from the RIF program. I read thousands of books to my kids and now am bombarding my grand daughter with books...

:toast:

to spend time in other peoples homes. I have found four categories of readers.

The first and rarest is a home with one or more bookshelves stuffed with books of all types and interests. These people are invariably progressive.

The second are homes with at least one bookshelf, stuffed with books but they are all computer tech manuals (I live in Silly-cone valley so this is to be expected). It's hard to tell where these people are politically and I suspect that they just have no real interest in politics. Interestingly, these people inevitably have a plethora of cook books. I'm not sure what that's all about as their kitchens don't ever look like they get much use, in fact, the last house I worked in that fit this catagory, I asked the owner if I could have a few snips of Rosemary from his garden for some bread I planned to make and he didn't even know he had Rosemary in his garden.

The third is homes with no books at all. Oh well, someone has to be interested in American Idol I guess.

And the last and best. The homes that have only one book, proudly displayed in some very conspicuous place with the author being Rush Limpballs, Annthrax Colter or their ilk. This is ALWAYS accompanied by the obligatory photo of the Bush-monster.

When I was in college--many years ago--I did a fair amount of babysitting. One of the perks was getting to look at the family's books & magazines. As this was a university town & I babysat for several professor's families, I got to see a good sampling. But even the non-academic people seemed to have at least the one bookshelf of assorted topics.

You know who the one exception was? It was a prof. and "expert" who'd served in the cabinet of a Republican president. Not one book was to be seen; and no magazines either. Still haven't figurd that one out!

that had a startling stat that in many homes, the only book is a bible. :wow:

You know how some people have a special place in their house for the bible? When I was growing up, that special place held a dictionary. Now I have a dictionary by my chair, my bed & my desk & a few stashed elsewhere! And I always keep old dictionarys. It's fun to see how language has evolved.

Welcome to DU, handmade34! :hi:

textbooks.

I think Amazon's charging about 50% too much for new books, considering there's almost no distribution cost and I'm sure the profits aren't being passed to the authors, but there are a lot of public domain works compatible with the Kindle format. Mr. Retrograde and I are catching up on the classics we should have read long ago, courtesy of Project Gutenberg: I'm on a Mark Twain kick right now.

The best part is that you can load it up with with dozens of books for a trip, and it fits in my purse, so I can have a large choice of reading material when I travel.

On the bus, can use my phone. At work, work computer. At home or coffee shop, laptop or desktop.

Portability = good.

Mechanics.

A mechanic who specialized in one brand of car would have a whole bookshelf full of service manuals. A mechanic who worked on, say, "Japanese cars" (any kind, so long as it has a Japanese nameplate) would need a library of manuals. Mechanics with their service manuals on Kindle would be able to put the whole library in their toolboxes. Same deal with any other kind of tech--appliance repair technicians would definitely be a huge market, because those techs make house calls.

You would need a search feature that worked across titles. It's not there on the Kindle yet.

I'm not sure why most techs would need it though. If you were a Mazda mechanic you'd need a Mazda3 manual, a Mazda6 manual, an RX8 manual, a Miata/MX5 manual...if you're fixing a Miata you don't need to look in the RX8 manual.

The mechanics at my company would need cross-title search...the service manuals for one of these trucks are broken down into functions because if they weren't the book would be three feet thick. Cars are a different story, and because there are so many more cars that's where they'd start.

The 1986 Accord I used to have was a "third generation" car. Any Accord 1986 to 1992 could be fixed out of its manual. OTOH, you wouldn't need a third generation manual to fix a 1995.

The pecking order is:

factory manual
Haynes manual
no manual
Chilton manual

Manuals on Kindle could be done as "delta manuals"==a baseline manual at the start of a year group, and add-on manuals detailing year-to-year changes. In that case you would need cross-volume search.

It indexes all books that it contains. It will also search on the web, at least the wikipedia and maybe other places.

It would be nice if it could do a boolean search with AND and OR.

Its drawback for car manuals and some textbooks is that it does not do so well with diagrams or illustrations. Needs a bigger screen at the minimum.

up-to-date guidebooks - several of them - all on a light hand-held device, so you can compare notes and look up information while you're there. Price the content so it's available for a month or so to bring down costs, and you've got a winner: it's more convenient than carrying 5 or 6 hardcopy guides around.

Any area where the content is more important than the format (I like your manuals example) would be suited to Kindle. I'd like to see magazines like the Economist and Science make content available this way:I want the information, don't necessarily want to keep the hard copies around, don't usually need to access last year's issues but can pull them from the website when I do.

I still manage to go through 2 or so real books a week, though, and expect that to continue. It's the difference between reading for pleasure and wanting the data.

actually a lot of industries could benefit from quickly accessed indices and manuals. i could imagine a lot of older lawyers and judges really enjoying this, especially if they haven't truly embraced the age of the laptop.

you will get real printed books out of my cold dead hands

the addictive smell and feel of a book.

Having said that, when I stopped in Borders earlier this week to get a book for my daughter, I looked around, inhaled that wonderful smell, and looked for titles that I would look for on my Kindle.

Our house is filled with books, and our love of reading has transferred to our daughters. They love my Kindle, but it's mine. When they are old enough to pay for one themselves, they can get one. Until then, my philosophy continues - I will always be happy to spend money on books they want. They won't get that $50 shirt from Aeropostale or the $200 pair of athletic shoes, but books are non-negotiable - they get them, whatever the theme or subject.

Reading is what matters to us, not the method.

Its one of the greatest things I've bought in the last 10 years.

I enjoy stroking the binding and caressing the cover.

The feel of the pages next to my fingers.

I got a thing for books.

Don't judge me.


hehehehehehe

:D

Me too.

If I could afford it though, I might try a Kindle for traveling.

book in my hands though.

...from our local indie bookstore and the library ~ but I'll use the kindle for books when traveling, and for publications like The Nation and Financial Times. Haven't purchased many magazines/newspapers in a long time because of the paper waste, so this will be great!

We'll see what you think then.

1. Scroll
2. Allow changing background color

I debated long and hard - over a year after it's original release - before buying one. Why? The cost.

Since I bought mine in Feb. (K2), I have bought every title I would have bought anyway, for significant savings over the cost of buying the hard copy, whether paper or hard back. In addition, Amazon offers a lot of free or low-cost (under $1.00) books, I have more than 70 titles currently on my Kindle, plus periodicals. While I haven't totalled the savings, I have no doubt that I have more than made up the cost of the Kindle already. There have been only one or two titles that I wanted that wasn't available on Kindle that I bought, then at least one was released on Kindle a week later! :(

Another feature I especially like is that you can download a sample of a book, to see if it interests you. If you don't like it, just delete the sample. And you have as long as you like. No deadline. Except for periodicals. You get a 14 day trial, then they start to charge you.