reader.ly

By marketing eReaders to people who already love to read, device manufacturers are failing to expand the market of potential buyers, thereby cannibalizing the sales of printed books. Or so says Jason Pinter over at Huffington Post in his article “Why the Digital Revolution is Missing the Big Picture” (via TeleRead). He makes some valid points with respect to marketing:

Look at the ads for the iPod: they’re fun, they’re cool, they feature all sorts of (pastel-colored) people who are far funkier than anyone you or I know grooving to the licensed beat. Then consider the ads for the Kindle: the music is straight out of your local elevator. Hesitant readers aren’t going to rush out to spend $299 for the reading equivalent of John Tesh. iPods sell the experience. E-readers are selling the gadget. And that’s bass-ackwards.

Pinter is right, the Kindle ad is incredibly boring, but I’d argue that the ads are simply not that effective. Case in point, he hasn’t bought an eReader, and neither have most of my friends who are big readers. Why do I have a Kindle? Because my gadget-loving husband wanted one, and he convinced me that he would start to read more books. In the decade that we’ve been together, he’s read perhaps four books a year – typically a sports book, a parenting book, a business book, and whichever Harry Potter novel came out that year. I was skeptical that his affinity for reading would last beyond the honeymoon phase of having a new toy, but he proved me wrong. We got the Kindle in May, and he’s read about a book a week since then. On my own, I probably would have been happy to stick to paperbacks for the next few years, but now I do almost all of my reading on the Kindle and am downloading at least a book a week.

It would seem that our household bears out the demographic analysis done by Forrester Research that I’ve previously quoted: “While early adopters of eReaders were a perfect storm of demographics for Amazon (they could afford the device, they have a need for the device in business travel and urban commuting, they like technology, and they buy lots of books online), future prospects for the devices look completely different.”

In other words, my husband is in the first wave of early adopters and Pinter and I are in the next wave — people who like to read and are not as swayed by technology’s lure. Except of course, that I’m married to someone in the former so I got pulled in ahead of my time.