When looking for a new tablet, it seems consumers have Apple on the brain. The Yankee Group recently disclosed the results of a December survey in which it asked, "What brand of tablet do you intend to buy [next]?" For Apple, it was good news as nearly half of the 506 questioned picked the iconic brand. Apple Insider contends this is bad news for the rest of the tablet market, as 47 percent of surveyed consumers mentioned their intention to purchase an iPad. That left 26 percent of respondents going for an Android-based tablet, and 23 percent saying they were unsure, or didn’t know. Just one percent...

Back on Valentine's Day (one week ago today), contributing writer Juli Monroe put together a just-for-fun survey that we hoped would tell us at least a little bit about the erotica e-reading habits of our audience. And the results are in! * * * Just under 40 percent of the survey's respondents (there were 31 in total) fessed up to buying blue lit in its electronic version as a way to hide their reading habits from others. This question's solitary "other" respondent said, "No, but I have downloaded free samples or free books." * * * Again, more "no" responses than "yes" for question number...

A million thank-you's to everyone who took the time out of their collective schedules to participate in our Calibre Survey over the weekend. As for the 100 101 of you who've taken the survey thus far, I'm sure you're at least somewhat curious to learn the final results. (And for those of you who may not have the slightest idea what I'm talking about, head on over to this post from last Friday, August 24.) At any rate, onto the results: We asked you to share your opinion about TeleRead's previous practice of republishing Calibre's weekly updates each Friday.  ¶ We found it particularly...

Happy Friday, TeleReaders! We've got an important question for you today, and we would truly appreciate hearing from as many of you as possible. It has to do with our previous practice of republishing Calibre's weekly updates (bug fixes, new features and so on) every Friday. We haven't yet decided if this is a practice we should continue, or halt immediately, and that's where you come in: Regardless of whether you log onto TeleRead five times a day or five times a year, we sincerely value your opinions. (Seriously. We're not joking. We really do want to know what you think.) So with that in...

The UK’s Daily Mail surveyed 1,863 UK readers on their e-book reading habits and determined that 34% of the readers surveyed admitted to using e-readers to conceal that they were reading erotic literature, 57% to hide reading children’s books such as Harry Potter, and 26% to hide their science fiction habit. (Science fiction is the Rodney Dangerfield of literary genres—it gets no respect, sometimes even from its own fans.) All in all, counting overlap in categories, 58% of the readers admitted using the device to “hide” reading something they wouldn’t want others to see them with. So much...

On FutureBook, blogger “Agent Orange” discusses the way manuscript consideration times have ballooned in recent years. Where it used to be a known standard that editors should take only one month to decide whether to offer or reject, now manuscripts can be held for a year or more without the authors hearing anything about them. While this might have flown in days before the Internet, now authors have social media and can communicate their anger with their publishers to other authors who might then be inclined not to do business with that publisher. And that’s not the worst of...

Laura Hazard Owen has a PaidContent post on a survey of the habits of over 1,100 “US Internet consumers” conducted by Citi analyst Mark Mahaney. Fully 23% of those surveyed own a Kindle-branded e-reader (which is really pretty impressive when you think about it). Perhaps more impressively, a July survey pegged Kindle owners at 12%, this means Kindle ownership has effectively doubled over the last 7 months. The survey also indicated that e-reader owners purchase on average 2.4 books per month, and 24% said they’d bought five or more books in the last thirty days. E-book reading is the most popular use...

Ars Technica and our sister blog Gadgetell have links to an interesting Pew Research survey on the demographics of smartphones. According to the survey, 46% of American adults now (think they) have smartphones. (8% aren’t sure whether what they have is a smartphone or not.) There are some numbers in the study relating to the demographics break down, but the most interesting takeaway for here, I think, is that now nearly half of American adults own a device that may be capable of reading e-books. It’s unclear how many of those people care about reading e-books on such a...

From the Taleist site.  It would be great if they got enough respndenets to be statistically significant.  (Blockquotes omitted) How are you doing as a self-publisher? It’s a hard question to answer isn’t it? What are you measuring against? We're taking a professional snapshot of the self-publishing industry There are self-publishing authors like JA Konrath, Amanda Hocking,  John Locke and (on a smaller but perfectly formed scale) Joanna Penn who are generous with their figures but they’re selling books from the tens of thousands to the millions. So does that mean you’re a failure if your figures are more modest? Or are you actually...

Presented at Digital Book World, Verso Advertising has posted the 46 slides from its 2011 Survey of Book Buying Behavior.  Note that Verso is an advertising agency, not a polling firm and we don't have any information about the competence of the company to conduct such surveys.  However, it is still probably worth reviewing. The ereaders/ebooks portion starts at slide 24 and here are some of the points made on their "Implications" slides, beginning at slide number 41: E-reader owners reaching Early Majority with 15.8% penetration, double that of the 2010 Survey ... However resistance remains high and seems to be intensifying at...

Forbes reports that the Kindle Fire may be “more profitable than expected” despite being (allegedly) sold at a loss. A market research company polled 216 Kindle Fire owners and determined that the average Kindle Fire owner will purchase $136 in digital goods over the lifetime of the device, giving it a cumulative operating margin of over 20%. Of course, as Nate Hoffelder points out at eBookNewser, this is just an estimate. And for that matter, 216 Kindle Fire owners is a remarkably small sample size considering just how many of them Amazon is estimated to have sold. ...

From the press release: As more publishing revenue transitions to digital, publishers are less optimistic about the state of the book publishing industry in general and much less optimistic about their own company’s chances at survival and growth, according to a Digital Book World survey conducted by Forrester Research, Inc. The full results of the survey will be released at the Digital Book World Conference + Expo in New York on January 24 (www.digitalbookworldconference.com). The survey was conducted among publishing executives at major publishing companies across the U.S. that represent 74% of all U.S. publishing revenues. According to the survey, now in...