Sunday News from the E-World

I regularly fly around the Internet checking out the news in the writing world, sometimes finding information to pass on here, sometimes finding articles to post in my newsletter. There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there, like the article in The Philadelphia Inquirer called “E-readers are on the rise thanks to older readers.” Right off, the title’s interesting because we tend to associate computers and e-books with young people. So, I, of course, started reading.

Here are a few quotes:

 It's early yet, and the data are churny, but some see an unusual tech trend - led by mature users, 40 and above.

Fully 50 percent of all downloaded books are still free - but the e-books market is finally starting to be substantial.

Sony debuted its Reader in 2006, and since then has sold 10 million e-books …
About 1.5 million Kindles had sold as of December - and the world took note when Amazon said that on Christmas Day, it sold more e-books than physical books, for the first time.

E-sales rocketed to $117.8 million through April of this year, at an annual rate double 2009's. Americans now own an estimated 2.8 million e-readers - not counting computers, still the most common kind.

E-book users, Becker said, tend to earn more than $100,000 a year, be college-educated, and be very Web and social-media savvy...

The iPad is one potential game-changer. Another is the Google Editions eBook Store, scheduled to go live any moment now, Google-big, Google-strong, to square off against Amazon and other e-vendors.

And these are only snippets from the article. Feel free to link over and read the full article, called “E-readers are on the rise thanks to older readers.”

What about you? Are you warming up to e-readers? We have one in our house. It’s my husband’s, so I’ve not yet read a book on it. He loves his iPad though.