Largest Kindle Survey Ever: eBook Readers Faithful To Authors, But Prices Can Veto Buying Decisions And Readers Are More Than Ready To Abandon Favored Bestsellers To Try Upstart Authors If Bestseller Prices Push Too High

By Tom Dulaney, Contributing Reporter

She's an avid reader. She's over 54. She loves to pick up new technology, the earlier the better if her budget permits. She lives in the US. An ebook's author and its price are the leading major factors in her decision to buy or not to buy an ebook. Recommendations by friends are key buying influences and, increasingly, so are recommendations by Amazon.com. She's very aware of ebook pricing and the price wars of the last year. She is a partisan in passionate support of Amazon and lower ebook prices.

That's the “typical” or “average” ebook lover among the record 2,275 people who responded to the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey conducted by Stephen Windwalker and his Kindle Nation Daily blog in January.

A point of interest: Survey respondents were asked for their demographic information in the most gentle of ways. An amazing 2,228—or 98% of all 2,275 people—shared their personal information.

The preponderance of respondents own and love their Kindle devices. The survey was open to the whole world during end of January, regardless of device they use to read ebooks. Survey details indicate large numbers of the respondents have devices other than Kindles on which they can read books from the Kindle Store. However, the overwhelming number of respondents do own Kindle devices, but are multi-device households.

The survey's 15 questions collected detailed information on readers' ebook buying habits, their preferences, their resistance to higher ebook prices, and their opinions on the key players in the book business. Those include authors, traditional publishers, independent authors, literary agencies, Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs of Apple, and the Kindle Nation Daily blog.

The data collected is detailed, each question deserving its own article or articles. Therefore, a series of stories follows this one to properly share the information in a meaningful way.

For now, a closer look at the people who responded in general terms:

• 67% are female, 33% male
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• 51.5% are over 54; 46.4% are between between 24 and 54; only 1.3% are under 25.
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• 70% call themselves “tech savvy,” but a significant 17.2% say they are not.
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• 75% love technology, and 70.1% are early adopters of new gadgets.
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• 17.3% use their Kindles when traveling outside their home nation.
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• Over 97% of them live in the US.
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• 1.3% are Canadian; 1.5% live in the UK, and another 3% are spread about the world. 7.1% often speak a language other than English.
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• 14% are authors, publishers, journalists or bloggers.

Posts following this one will delve into such issues as motivations for buying books, price points at which readers rebel in large numbers and delay buying or refuse to buy, and opinions on the key “stake holders” in the industry, from Apple's Steve Jobs to Amazon's Jeff Bezos to mega-publishers and independent publishers.

Nine articles follow this introduction, covering many details. Beyond that, for those who want to delve deeply into the spreadsheets and stats, all of them are online at these links:

ADD LINKS TO THE WINTER 2011 SURVEY AND ALL THE OTHERS TOO