世論 What Japan Thinks

A recent survey by goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, looked at IT-related technical terms.

Demographics

Between the 30th of July and the 3rd of August 2010 1,077 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.2% in their forties, 15.7% in their fifties, and 12.1 aged sixty or older.

At work I often hear technical terms being bandied around that I think people either don’t understand, have misunderstood, or even worse, have taken on a specific meaning throughout the company not really related to the original definition. My two pet hates are “cloud” for “hetrogeneous network” and “black box” for “immutable interfaces”.
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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.
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Although all electronic book readers in Japan have died a death since the very first one in 1990, with even big manufacturer-backed models like Panasonic’s Sigma Book and Sony’s Librie failing, Amazon’s Kindle and even Sony’s western models are flying off the shelves. To see if there are any signs of life in the Japan market, iBridge Research Plus looked at electronic book readers in a report published on japan.internet.com.

Demographics

On the 28th of December 2009 300 members of the iBridge monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.0% of the sample were male, 11.7% in their twenties, 31.3% in their thirties, 31.0% in their forties, 16.7% in their fifties, and 9.3% in their sixties.

For me too the current price of around 20,000 to 30,000 yen for the average reader is a bit much, especially as most companies haven’t got the interface quite right yet, judging from the reviews. As to why people are setting their price tag so low, perhaps it has something to do with the already-established user-base for mobile phone-based reading material?
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