“There’s a mistaken belief that consumers are the most interested in dedicated reading devices, but it’s not true,” says Michael Norris, senior analyst of Simba Information. “Since we know most book consumers only purchase a tiny number of titles in a given year, you could assume a $300 gadget to read a $6 paperback doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. For the second year in a row, we can back that assumption up.”

The PC, as Norris points out, also had a big head start over dedicated devices like Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s nook. The PC is also very common and public transit commuters often have one with them anyway (and may read a book on their computers at the office while pretending to work).

“Dedicated devices have been chipping at the PC’s lead for a while,” added Norris. “For the iPad to get any sort of dominance, it needs to become very popular very fast among the PC crowd and not necessarily the dedicated device crowd.”

Trade E-Book Publishing 2010 drew much of its analysis from a Simba Information survey of over 1,880 U.S. adults administered in February and March 2010, as well as over a year’s worth of bestseller analysis from the e-bookstore of Sony, Amazon and others. The report compares the top categories of each bookstore to one another and to national print bestseller lists to determine what kinds of e-books consumers are demanding, and contains an analysis of pricing strategies. New to this edition is a section on price sensitivity of e-books, as well as updated information on last year’s report, which determined 8% of the U.S. adult population bought at least one e-book in the prior 12-month period.

For more information on the research found in this report click here.

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