世論 What Japan Thinks

This survey into electronic book readers by iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com found that the iPad seemed an attractive choice to many electronic book readers.

Demographics

On the 24th of May 2010 300 members of the iBridge monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.7% of the sample were male, 15.3% in their twenties, 30.0% in their thirties, 28.0% in their forties, 19.7% in their fifties, and 7.0% in their sixties.

There must have been a corresponding question to Q1SQ2 for Amazon’s Kindle, as although it wasn’t reported the text implied that many fewer people were interested in reading on a specialised device.

Despite good reviews of Sony’s e-readers, they don’t seem to be on sale in Japan for some reason and their Japanese web site stopped updating at the end of 2008, although if I were to hazard a guess it would be due to the difficulty in making a deal with the rather old-fashioned mindsets that seem to present in Japanese publishing houses.

Research results

From the original sample, 80.0%, or 240 people, knew roughly or well what electronic books were. They were asked the following.

Q1: Have you ever read an electronic book? (Sample size=240)

Yes (to SQs)	22.5%
No	77.5%

Q1SQ1: On what devices have you read electronic books? (Sample size=54)

	Votes	Percentage
PC	38	70.4%
Mobile phone	20	37.0%
PDA	4	7.4%
iPhone, other smartphone	3	5.6%
Electronic book reader	2	3.7%
Other	1	1.9%

Q1SQ2: If there was electronic book reading software, would you want to read books on the iPhone, iPad? (Sample size=54)

Yes	44.4%
No	27.8%
Don’t know	27.8%