Pew Research

I haven’t seen this written elsewhere, but the latest Pew ebook study seems to me to confirm that the publishers are doing the right thing for sales by constricting the availability of many of the most attractive books from library shelves.

That conjecture on my part comes from a data point that some may interpret a different way.

The data point that interested me is that 41% of respondents who at some time borrowed an ebook from a library bought the most recent ebook they read.

To some, this could suggest that publishers’ fears that library patrons will be weaned away from buying ebooks are overblown. Indeed, it is certainly possible that “discovery” at the library of a desirable ebook could lead to the purchase of a title for which the wait would be too long.

It could mean that.

What it seems to me more likely to mean is that the lack of library access to the most commercial titles forces those readers who care more about what they read than what they pay to purchase titles which the library doesn’t have (and which they probably “discovered” somewhere else.)

According to Jeremy Greenfield’s report on the Digital Book World site (wth apologies to them for changing their “e-book” styling to our unhyphenated standard):

“eBook borrowers being buyers is a phenomenon that’s true in the print world as well,” said Molly Raphael, president of the American Library Association. “We know this anecdotally and this data that shows it is an important finding for us.”

Raphael said that ebook borrowers will discover a book they want to borrow and then see that they have to wait for it to become available and will get impatient and buy it. eBook borrowers also sometimes sample ebooks by borrowing them and then buy them.

What Raphael says is true. But it could also well be that the number purchasing books would drop sharply if all the commercial publishers made their most popular titles available, particularly if they did it without windowing.

There’s lot of other interesting data in the study. What really caught my eye is that 58% of Americans have a library card. I find that number considerably higher than my intuition would have suggested.

A couple of other data points from the study feel like they support my view that publishers are doing the right thing for their commercial interests. Pew found that 55% of the e-book readers who also had library cards said they preferred to buy their ebooks and 36% said they preferred to borrow them from any source—friends or libraries. But among the ebook borrowers, only 33% say they generally prefer to buy ebooks and 57% say they generally prefer to borrow them. Combined with the point that has gotten a lot of early attention, that most patrons don’t even know that libraries offer ebooks, I see a very strong suggestion that library availability of ebooks will reduce sales more than stimulate them.

None of this is conclusive but I thought my instinctive conjecture was out of step with the spin the study was getting and therefore worth this brief Friday post.

There are a few gems to interpret in the just-released Pew survey of ebook reading.

1. We are getting very close to half (they report 43%) of Americans 16 and older saying they have read a book or other long-form content in digital format in the past year. As other data in the survey suggest, this number is still rising rapidly.

This number is an index of how much of the reading public can be reached without print. Since elsewhere in the data it is reported that only 78% of the people 16 and over have read a book in any format in the past 12 months, it appears that more than half the book readers can be reached without print already.

2. Pew tracked some startling growth around Christmas. Just before the holiday, 17% of Americans 18 and over (sometimes they seem to measure “adult” from age 16, sometimes from age 18) had read an ebook in the previous 12 months. But right after the holiday, that number had jumped to 21%. Remembering that 22% of the population hadn’t read a book at all in the past 12 months, that means that about 27% of book readers report having read an ebook recently. And that number jumped nearly 25% in a month!

3. One of the most startling data points reported is that both tablet ownership and ereader ownership had just about doubled over Christmas, from 10% in mid-December to 19% in mid-January in both cases. With overlap accounted for, Pew estimates that 28% of Americans 18 and over own one or both.

Device ownership is still climbing fast, although it is likely that the overlap, a single person owning both devices, grew faster over this Christmas than it had before. When people get a second device, a replacement or a complementary device, they probably don’t indulge in the same buying spurt as they do when they get their first device. The data summary I saw didn’t correlate the rise in ownership of each of the two devices with the rise in ownership of either of the two devices, which limits our ability to forecast how much content growth we should see following the increase in device penetration.

4. Device owners who own an ebook reader read an average of 24 books in the previous year, but those who don’t, including those who own tablets, only read an average of 16 books. The report says that tablet owners read the same number of books as those who don’t own devices.

This data would seem to confirm the conjecture that multi-function tablets present many alternatives to ebook reading and therefore aren’t as reliable catalysts for reading growth as dedicated ebook readers are.

5. The survey found that 41% of people who have owned a tablet or ebook reader for more than a year say they are reading more books than before, but only 35% of those who have owned either device for six months or less make that statement.

This could mean that people just steadily increase their reading when they get a device. But another possible explanation (which I think is likely to be the more meaningful) is that the difference doesn’t have to do with how long people have owned a device but instead reflects the fact that the heaviest readers shift to digital formats first. The more recent converts are less likely to be heavy readers and therefore are less likely to increase their book reading because of device ownership.

6. In the December 2011 survey, 72% of American adults had read a printed book in the past year, 17% had read an ebook, and 11% had listened to an audio.

So ebooks passed audio in penetration of consumers in 2011. Audiobooks started to rise in popularity in the mid-1980s, nearly 30 years ago. eBooks have been gaining traction since late 2007, or less than five years.

7. In an 18 month period (June 2010 to December 2011), the number of people reading an ebook on the average day jumped from 4% to 15%.

This is a great data point and really illustrates the explosive growth of ebooks. The number of people reading an ebook on any particular day doubled twice in 18 months. Two more doublings would put the number of readers each day at 60% and, given that the heavier readers become digital first, that might constitute access to 80% of the consumption. The rate of growth will absolutely slow down; it will not double twice again in the next 18 months. But how much will it slow down? How about two doublings in the next three years? Five years? Whatever it takes, that’s the distance between us and an overwhelmingly ebook world.

8. A startling stat: more device owners are reading a printed book on any given day than an electronic one. Only 49% of Kindle and Nook owners are reading an ebook on any given day, but 59% are reading a printed book. Less surprising is that 39% of tablet owners are reading an ebook and 64% are reading a printed book.

Of all the data in this report, this piece would give the greatest comfort to those who believe the printed book has a long and prosperous future still in front of it. It would be considerably more helpful if we understood better which printed books these people are reading. If the device owners are reading novels in both formats, that’s quite a different thing than if they’re reading novels on their devices but using cookbooks in print. And we should remember a fact that Peter Hildick-Smith of Codex has imparted: ebook device owners tend to keep increasing the ratio of their reading to ebooks from print books over time.

9. One question delivered the most startling answers considering how far along we are in device penetration. The most commonly employed ebook reader is a plain old computer, on which 42% of people read ebooks as opposed to 41% on Kindles and Nooks. That’s surprising. Perhaps even more surprising is that more people (29%) read ebooks on a cell phone than on a tablet computer (23%).

As an iPhone-only book reader, I’m going to stop feeling like so much of an outlier. But there is even more significance to the fact that so much of the reading is done on PCs. That means two very important things to me. One is that a lot of people are reading in the office on their computers while their bosses and colleagues think they’re working. And the other is that all the hope that is harbored by illustrated book publishers that tablets will drive greater uptake of their ebooks, that sales so far have been constrained by the limitations of ebook readers, may already have been demonstrated to be futile. If nearly half the ebook audience already reads on fully capable PCs, they are already able to consume ebooks with color and illustrations and video and audio without needing a tablet. But they aren’t. The question is, “will they ever?”

10. eBooks narrowly nosed out print, 45% to 43%, as the favorite for reading in bed. Apparently they didn’t probe whether tablets or phones, which are backlit and enable reading without room light, are favored in that situation.