世論 What Japan Thinks

This week’s new survey series is into electronic books, conducted by goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com as usual.

Demographics

Between the 26th and 28th of September 2011 1,078 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% of the sample were male, 16.3% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.3% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, and 27.9% aged fifty or older.

If I exclude online manuals, I’ve read exactly one electronic book, on a iPaq PDA. Actually, make that two, as I had the very dubious pleasure of reading this on a PC and had almost succeeded in forgetting about it until now.

As the price of a basic e-ink Kindle has seriously dropped, if it’s offered for a similar price in Japan I could very well pick it up myself. I wouldn’t even consider picking up an e-bookified Android tablet, not without some major subsidies to soften the blow of the loss of functionality.

Research results

Q1: Have you ever read an electronic book, magazine, etc? (Sample size=1,078)

When the 401 who had read an electronic book were asked how they had read these books, the top answer was 28.6% reading a web site from a computer, 22.3% downloading to a computer, 17.2% reading online from an iPad or other tablet, 17.0% downloading to a smartphone, 16.8% reading online from a smartphone, and 16.5% downloading to a tablet. You will notice that traditional feature phones do not appear in that list, and neither do specialised e-book readers.

Q1SQ: Which of the following specialised e-book readers would you like to try out? (Sample size=704, multiple answer)