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Makers of e-books are stingy with their numbers, and industry watchdogs disagree, but some say a large proportion of early e-book owners - up to 66 percent in some surveys - are older than 40, with a "sweet spot" in the 35-to-54 range.
Smythe of Sony said that "as of now, the whole e-book industry was trending older," and Tony Astarita, vice president of digital products at Barnes & Noble, said that "our initial adoption was skewed to heavy readers and an older demographic." Astarita expects, however, that as e-book prices moderate, "we're going to see a more general audience."
Risa Becker, vice president of research operations for GfK MRI, reports on a survey released in May: "We're not finding the more-mature trend, and only a very slight tendency for men to own e-readers more than women." Yet for certain readers, such as the Kindle, early users are more frequently female. Smythe said, "We're seeing a greater percentage of women than men; a lot of women are taking to this."
Becker said, "Women were 11 percent more likely than men to say they read an e-book, and men were 20 percent more likely to have read a magazine and 19 percent more likely to have read a newspaper."
E-book users, Becker said, tend to earn more than $100,000 a year, be college-educated, and be very Web and social-media savvy: "These people do everything on the Web. They spend more than 20 hours a week on it."
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 2010
