NEWS

Nielsen Book Releases Latest Findings from its Understanding the Digital Consumer Research

Nielsen Book today released the latest findings from its Understanding the Digital Consumer survey conducted in November 2014 to examine the habits and attitudes of UK adults relating to books and digital technology.

The latest research used online interviews with a 2,000 nationally representative sample of UK adults. A number of questions from previous surveys were repeated in 2014 covering engagement with e-books, device ownership, lending, sharing and transferring e-books between devices, sources of e-books, advantages of e-books and circumstances in which they are chosen ahead of print. This year there were new topics covering device use for other activities, self-publishing, book subscriptions, crowd sourcing and price expectations examined for the first time; the full report is now available.

Key findings:

• 3% of UK adults say they currently have an e-book subscription

• The proportion of downloaders claiming to have borrowed e-books from public libraries doubled to 15% between 2012 and 2014

• Overall, 11% of non-e-book buying UK adults say they are likely to buy e-books in the next 6 months

• Whilst most of those buying e-books also buy print books sometimes, a significant proportion buy both editions of the same book at least sometimes

• What type of device do UK adults use: two thirds use smartphones and over half use a tablet.

Nielsen Book’s Understanding the Digital Book Consumer research project was launched in 2010 to examine in depth, and over time, the habits and attitudes of UK adults relating to books and digital technology, and supplements the measurement of the print and e-book markets by Nielsen’s BookScan and Books & Consumers services; the full results of the Books & Consumers survey will be presented at the Nielsen BookInsights Conference on 25 March.

www.nielsenbook.co.uk