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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Searches for e-books double

February 02, 2009

Over the last year UK interest in e-books has grown significantly, with searches for ‘ebooks’ doubling between January 2008 and 2009. There are four main e-book readers currently available: the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Borders iLiad, and the Bookeen Cybook V3. In the US the Kindle e-book reader sold out within a few hours of its launch.

Charting the most popular searches for each reader shows that in the US the Kindle is by far the most searched for e-reader. However in the Kindle is not yet available in the UK and therefore it is the Sony Reader that dominates UK e-reader searches. As you can see from the chart below, this Christmas searches for ‘ebooks’ peaked a couple of weeks after those for the readers.

UK_Internet_searches_for_ebooks_amazon_kindle_sony_reader_2009_2008_chart.png

Searches for e-readers have followed similar patterns in the US and UK. Interest has been building since September 2008 and there were peaks in November and December in the build up to Christmas. Interestingly, relative to population, the market share of searches for the ‘kindle’ in the US is the almost the same as the market share of searches in UK for the ‘sony reader’.

eBooks.com receives the most traffic from UK searches for ‘ebooks’, despite the fact not all of its titles are available to UK buyers. The demographic info foreBooks.com shows that 31% of visitors to the site come from people aged 55+, implying that this might be one technology where the early adopters are older rather than younger.

Two of the more interesting sites receiving traffic from e-book searches are free-ebooks.net and Project Gutenberg, both of which offer free downloads. Project Gutenberg is one of the more established e-book sites and most of its content is available for free because it focuses on books that are out of copyright. As you would expect, e-book searches are always on the look out for free stuff and the second most popular search including the term ‘ebooks’ is ‘free ebooks’.

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