Amazon’s Kindle e-reader has emerged as one of the most popular gifts this Christmas, according to the latest research from YouGov’s Technology and Telecoms analysts.
And while a total of 1.3 million e-readers and tablets were received over Christmas 2011, it was clearly a ‘Kindle Christmas’ – with Amazon’s own product accounting for a whopping 92% of all e-readers bought.
In fact, YouGov data indicates that one in every 40 adults in Great Britain received an e-reader as a Christmas present, either as a gift or as a present to themselves.
To reach these conclusions, YouGov quizzed a total of 2,012 adults in the UK between 28th December 2011 and 3rd January 2012, asking them about the gifts they had personally received or bought for themselves over the Christmas period. These online research results were them modelled by analysts in the Technology and Telecoms Consulting Team to represent the entire adult population in the UK.
“This is finally the year when the late-medieval technology of the printing press was challenged by a 21st Century, digital alternative,” says Marek Vaygelt, Head of Technology and Telecoms Consulting at YouGov. “Amazon has done a remarkable job of selling the benefits of e-readers and the upside for the publishing industry is that it appears e-reader owners, at least in the early days, buy more e-books than the printed books they purchased before acquiring an e-reader.”
Demographics
In keeping with the demographics of book purchasing in the UK, some 61% of Kindles were received by women, with over 55-year-olds twice as likely as 18-24-year-olds to receive one.
Tablets also did well this Christmas, with more than 640,000 tablets given as gifts to adults, 72% of them Apple iPads, with 60% of the Apple products being given to women.
The research also found that Londoners had the greatest likelihood of receiving an iPad but were the least likely to have received a Kindle – although other brands of e-readers were relatively more successful in the capital.
