Quote:
Originally Posted by MidnightBlue
I think that DRM is an issue for a very small number of people, probably most of them geeks.
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Since the most recent de-drm tools update (22 May 2012), the tools have been downloaded directly from the original location over 70,000 times, and probably passed on to many more people by secondary distribution.
"Very small"? Well, perhaps when looking at that as a percentage of the whole population. But then, the percentage of the population that read books for fun is rather small. And then number who buy (say) more than a dozen ebooks a year is much smaller than that.
So I suspect that of the people who do buy significant numbers of ebooks, it's not a small percentage at all.
Suspicions are all very well, but I then went to look for some figures and found
this. It's only for the US, but worth looking at I think. 19% of adult Americans own an ebook reader, and the average ebook reader owner reads 24 (mean) or 12 (median) books (NB books, not just ebooks) a year.
The tricky bit is working out how many people are buying significant numbers of ebooks (rather than paper books).
One detail from the survey is quoted in
this article: 5% of US adults read more than 50 books a year. Not that that helps with the figures.
Figures to nearest million.
Number of adult Americans =
239m
Number of adult Americans with ebook reader = 45m
Number of adult American who reads 12 or more books a year = 23m
Number of adult Americans with ebook reader who buy more than 12 ebooks a year: no data. Say 1/3 or the above: 7 million or so.
Percentage of those people who've found and downloaded the de-drm tools: 1%
Hmm... OK, it is a small percentage. But interesting to have a number, even if it is still partly guesswork.