As I was pulling together the final pieces for my book "Kindle Culture," one of the last items on my list was to comb through almost 70 pages of the Amazon Kindle Forum's "Average Kindle Owner's Age" thread to get a better idea of who's actually buying the Kindle.
Though I ended up culling 1,387 responses from almost 1,700 posts, these charts don't adhere to polling science standards and should thus be taken with a grain of salt. That said, my methodology included the use of second-hand figures ("my son, 27, has one too"), and the exclusion of ill-defined ages ("I'm in my 50s"), questionable responses (106-year-old Sigmund Freud says, "I like the large type!"), and a handful of entries that were repeated one or more times.
The resulting data suggests that the largest group of Kindle owners by decade are in their 50s. The next two largest are owners in their 40s at 19.1% and owners in their 60s at 18%, making the total number of Kindle owners between the ages of 40 and 69 an incredible 58.6%. Owners above 70 make up an additional 8.1%, with owners under the age of 40 accounting for just over a third of all Kindle sales.
Using broader target demographic standards, the results look like this:
Younger adults (18-34) – 22%
Adults (35-54) – 38.4%
Older adults (over 54) – 37.3%
The Kindle might also be a popular 60th birthday present--more 60-year-olds reported owning the device than any other age, with 59-year-olds coming in a close second. (Another side note I found interesting was the number of respondents in their 20s and 30s who mentioned that they had been reading since a very young age.)
There are plenty of factors that could skew these results, ranging from affluency and disposable income to the overall age of visitors who visit Amazon's boards. But if these numbers are any indication, the Kindle appears to be the first general purpose technology device I know of with an early adopter demographic that favors the over-54 age bracket over the usual 18-34 group, effectively turning one perennial marketing trend on its head.
We kept going back and forth with the caption on this one, not wanting to offend anyone by suggesting the only purpose for old books these days was to make furniture. Personally we enjoy old books just as much as we ever did, as visitors to the huge library we made in the space that was meant to be our dining room will tell you.
The logical next step after Amazon opens the UK and European markets. Kindle 9 from outer space!
We hope this third installment of the "Kindle Culture" comic brightens your day. If you missed the first two, here are the direct links:
I finally jumped on the Twitter train about a month ago and have really enjoyed reading people's comments about the Kindle. I started saving some of my favorites and thought it might be fun to post them here once a month. That led to an idea for a sort of non-contest; I have tweeted @ messages to these ten folks and the first one who comes to this site and posts a comment will win a free copy of my book "Kindle Culture" when it comes out for the Kindle later this month*. If it goes well, I plan to do this every month. In the meantime, thanks for the entertaining tweets!
So you just bought your Kindle 2 and you're looking for a book that will help you get to the heart of ternary alloy systems--you know, phase diagrams, crystallographic data, the whole enchilada. Well thanks to the folks at Materials Science International Team, you can be reading the 500-page "Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems (Part 4)" on your Kindle in a minute for just $6,431.20--and that's a whopping 20% off the list price of $8,039. (Full disclosure: I will make over $250 if you buy this book through the above link.)
This photo isn't to scale, but gives an idea of what the speaker for the first Kindle (center) was like versus the split configuration that was adopted for the Kindle 2. The actual difference in sound is comparable to what the picture suggests, though still not something I've spent a lot of time listening to so far. Click on the shot for a closer look.
This is a recently-released public domain photo that I had originally planned to use to compare the screen quality of the Kindle 1 and Kindle 2, until I saw what a wonderful job A Kindle World had done in that regard here. So I decided to turn it into a 600x800 Kindle screensaver instead.
Talk about so 2008! A post by Matt Burns appearing today at CrunchGear reveals how completely out of the loop USA Today is with this ad touting the paper's availability...on the original Kindle.
One of the complaints I hear most often from book lovers who don't want to try the Kindle is a tactile one. And while it's true the Kindle will probably never feel and smell exactly like a real book, the kind folks over at DuraSport Electronics have spent some serious research and development dollars to come up with an idea that promises to be the next best (and next big) thing--the first aerosol e-book enhancer.
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