Quote:
Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
This may or may not be relevant but there are approximately 4 billion tablets and smartphones compared with about 100 million or less ereaders. In 2014, there were 75 million ereaders total. (The findings are in a thread on this forum. )
|
How many are used primarily or even regularly for reading?
It's a matter of commitment. eink owners are people that rdad often enough to justify the expense. The same applies to a subset or multifunction device readers but there is no way of knowing how important reading for them.
There's a billion Windows10 devices, hundreds of millions using Edge browsers that could handle epubs, yet so few did so that MS didn't bother to keep the feature when they switched the browser codebase.
Likewise there's zillions of iOS and MacOS devices and Android phones yet Apple has a small ebook sales market share (10%?) and Google is stuck in the low-single digit range. in both cases, their sales are dwarfed by Amazon and at best comparable to Kobo. (We're too polite to talk of Nook.
)
There's no question there's a lot of ebook readers outside the eink platforms but there's no telling how significant a segment tbey are; how many are avid readers buying dozens of books a year, casual readers buying one or two a year, or something in between. At most we can assume that the vast majority of eink users are avid readers. (Or independently wealthy and think nothing of spend $100 to read one book a year.
)
At this point, trying to track the stores is going to be more productive than tracking hardware, especially given the longevity of hardware, so that even decling sales of either says nothing about number of readers doing eink.
(FWIW, I have all four platforms: phone, PC, eink, and multiple tablets. At one time or another I read of the latter three but when I settle down for extended reading it's the eink I reach for. Maybe I'm just weird.)