Need a laugh? Via Twitter: The most popular Damn You Autocorrects this past May. I often go to that site when I’m so pissed off I might break something, because without fail, I will hurt myself laughing. Free therapy FTW!
Here’s some research sent to me by reader Kim, via Media Post. First: eReaders Found Lying in Bed:
According to the Nielsen recent survey of nearly 12,000 mobile connected device owners, 70% of tablet owners and 68% of smartphone owners said they use their devices while watching television, compared to only 35% of eReader owners.
Further, when asked where they use the devices, 61% of eReader owners use their device in bed, compared to 57% of tablet owners and 51% of smartphone owners.
I find this interesting, especially since Kobo’s last presentation that I saw at Tools of Change in February stated that their research, based on user habits of their reading apps, indicated that people don’t read in bed so much as they do read on their morning commutes. (I wish I had a link to the Kobo research and I don’t. I’m sorry). Maybe the correct answer is that readers do things all different ways, all the time, which is why we are awesome and frustrating from a market research perspective.
When examining what else people are doing while they use their devices, the results were also interesting:
Tablet owners said 30% of their time spent with their device was while watching TV compared to 21% lying in bed. Smartphone owners say that 20% of the time they are using their smartphones is while watching TV, compared to 11% lying in bed.
However, while eReader owners indicated only 15% of their eReader time was spent watching TV, but they spent a whopping 37% of that device usage time in bed.
I am totally one of those people who has an internet-connected device with me while I watch TV. If I’m not searching for and saving a recipe, I’m looking up who that guy was that killed that girl on that show I saw .02 seconds of. Hubby uses his laptop while watching TV to keep track of the baseball games he’s not watching.
But wait, there’s more!
Today’s Media Research Brief examines who buys ebooks: Book Worms Consuming More. The results are SO NOT SHOCKING:
Today’s e-book power buyer, someone who buys an e-book at least once a week, is a 44-year-old woman who loves romance and is spending more on buying books now than in the past. She uses a dedicated e-reader like a Kindle instead of reading on her computer.
I’m not 44 but that sounds a lot like me. Drawing from BISG research that I’ve heard before at ToC and DBW, the report also repeats the data such as:
- E-books currently make up around 11% of the total book market. The percentage of print book consumers who say they download e-books more than doubled between October 2010 and January 2011, from 5% to almost 13%.
- Women make up 66% of e-book power buyers. In 2009, they didn’t even make up half of e-book customers (they were at 49% of the e-book market)
- Most e-books sold (58%) are fiction, with literary fiction, science fiction, and romance each comprising over 20% of all e-book purchases
- “Power buyers” represent about 18% of the total people buying e-books today, but they buy 61% of all e-books purchased
- The most influential factors leading to an e-book purchase are free samples and low prices.
Again, not shocking. I’m more curious if there are more e-readers in bed than I thought.
Mazel tov to Quest, Kendal, and the Harlequin team for the arrival of baby Harlequin, an endangered Peregrine falcon. Harlequin was born Sunday night, and the pictures online are adorable.
There’s a live cam shot of the nesting box at the Harlequin blog, and I have my fingers crossed, and toes and talons too (Yes, of course I have talons. You suspected otherwise?) for the happy family.
Expect falcon romances, y’all. Which would be awesome!
And finally, this total douchenugget said something shitty about female authors, but then the Guardian did something funny that’s totally worth experiencing, especially because it proves the asshat douchecanoe wrong. Via Laura Vivanco comes this fun activity.
In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society this week,
during which VS Naipaul provoked fury by suggesting that women
writers are ‘sentimental’ and ‘unequal to me’, he also claimed
that ‘I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I
know whether it is by a woman or not.’
Says Vivanco, “So the Guardian has made up a quiz that allows you to guess the gender of the writer based on the excerpt.
I was very gratified that I did extremely badly. I was also amused when it was revealed that one of the excerpts comes from Laura Abbot’s A Forever Mother. It’s a current online read at eHarlequin.”
AWESOME.
So…. how’d you do on the quiz?
nice one, I scored 7 out of 10.
captcha 77: that`s nearly 77 %….
Wow, that power-buyer description was eerily close to me—after all, I don’t look a day over 44. 😉
In bed is about the only chance I do have to read my Kindle, although I carry it with me for waiting-around moments. I barely watch tv and I don’t have any handheld internet devices, so it’s me, my Kindle, and sometimes my kid in bed with me.
I did take the test just for fun…but really, why would I even want to know if a male or a female author wrote a text?
7/10 for me. I noticed that if the author started talking about where objects were in the room, I thought it was a man.
I usually read my Kindle in bed, but I also read in the living room, in waiting rooms, airplanes… really the same places I used to read ‘real’ books.
It’s so exciting to watch the falcons nest! Thanks for sharing the link.
THANK YOU. To me, quality is ultimately subjective (…duh?) and doesn’t need pre-qualifying by gender. I personally feel that Naipaul is pretentious crap, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that someone else wouldn’t enjoy it, so if asked if I would recommend his work, I would generally say “I didn’t like it, but you might.” How is this so hard for anyone, even a douchecanoe being interviewed, to say?
And Sarah, I thank you forever for “douchecanoe”. It is now in my canon of insults, and it’s nice to know my potty mouth can still be improved at 42.
– -kim
2 out of 10! Agree, felt like guessing on most of them, had even read one of the books and did not recognize the paragraph.
I have read a few ebooks on my smartphone and laptop, maybe 2 a month, but getting most of my books at the library and continuing to tackle my TBR pile of physical books (about 15 physical books a month. Will be a while before I am tapped out of library items, very inexpensive and convenient.
Would like to convert all my keeper pile books to ebooks, but only when the platform wars have stabilized and they are offering good bulk purchase deals.
Definitely read in bed – sometimes in morning before getting up, sometimes in evening before sleep, like Motel 6, leave the light on for ya!
Gotta love those survey folks who believe that most folks read while commuting. I’m not sure if there’s a specific law against e-reading while driving, but it can’t be that different than texting while driving, right?
Oh wait. Everyone in the world lives in New York City (or another major metropolis whose mass transit goes somewhere interesting…like to places where people actually live and work).
🙂
5/10 My favorite quote in the article is
Exactly how can that not be unkind. Don’t insult someone and then try to worm your way out of it.
He’s just an attention grabbing idiot.
I forgot to say, that baby falcon is full of fluffy cuteness. Thanks for the link.
And I’m glad to see the DYAC link – it is also my go-to site for a belly laugh, usually leading to tears of mirth.
Thank you for the autocorrect link. Hilarious! Sent it to my husband. We’re always having these issues. But they’re great for a laugh.
I’m almost a textbook example of the ebook power buyer, so for research purposes: read in bed, yes; read in chair, yes; read in bathroom, yes (but only if the book has me really hooked); read on commute, no (I’m avid but I’m not dumb enough to try reading and driving at the same time); read at work, yes (shh, some of it is NSFW); read while waiting in a line (not yet, but I’m seriously tempted); read while watching television, NO! (I don’t even want a t.v. on anywhere in the house while I’m reading). I’ve also been known to read while eating eggs and ham.
Am I misreading this quote or do the numbers not add up? Basic math tells me that over 20% each adds up to more than 60%. Also, isn’t all fiction literary? I know it is to me. I guess delusions of grandeur fiction is a bit lengthy for a genre title.
That quiz is the perfect response to Mr. Naipaul and I sucked at it. 3 out of 10. It would have been 4 out of 10, but No. 10 seemed too obvious, so I got it wrong. I did get Mr. Naipaul’s excerpt right though. Does that mean he’s a really male male?
Got 8/10, mostly by marking the stuff that was awkward and overly-detail-oriented as “male.” Whoops! Did I say that out loud?
And definitely read the Kindle everywhere, buying 8-10 books a week (my book budget has gone WAAAAY up since buying the Kindle: Publishers, take note).
I gots ‘sloppy thinking’ and a ‘clearly must read more books by mheeennnn’. Ha! 4/10.
Kindle. Bed. Before sleep. Plus chocolate.
Oh, Jason! Possibly the worst way to get dumped ever – by Autocorrect.
I got 4/10 but I recognised one of the books and guessed which was the Harlequin. So there were really only 2 I got right without knowing.
9/10, it would have been 10/10 but I changed one of my answers thinking it was too easy and was therefore a trap! I don’t think either gender is superior, and I read both genders about equally.
Author gender and character construction is actually something I think about a lot. I tend to prefer books written by women, mostly because I find that a lot of books written by men have empty or overly simplistic female characters (although obviously there are men who write awesome female characters and women who write terrible ones). IMHO, it’s more based on how often one thinks about one’s gender socialization and positioning in society than one’s sex.
I find Naipaul’s comment especially offensive because men frequently have the luxury of not thinking about how their gender affects them, while women rarely do.
I had 3 of 10 right. So much for that 🙂
I’m a Kindle user and I have more books on my Kindle than I’ll ever get round to reading. I read everywhere I can (bus, train, at work on break, in bed, on the sofa, you name it.)
Hmm…I’m a little disturbed I got 8 out of 10 right. LOL.
I’d be interested to see how people who read on other devices (iPhone, tablet, etc.) stack up compared to dedicated devices. For example, My mom reads her Kindle in bed, but takes it with her out of the house. I rarely do. I read in bed (and on the sofa, kitchen table, etc.) on my Kindle all the time, but out of the house, I’m usually reading the same book on my iPhone, because I don’t want to have to lug my Kindle around everywhere. The only exceptions to that are if I’m going somewhere I KNOW there will be a lot of downtime (doctor’s office, etc.) or if I’m traveling.
Captcha: left77. I left my kindle with my TBR “pile” of 77 books at home.
Funny enough, my TBR “pile” on the Kindle is actually 72 books. So not far off! LOLOL
Even if you could afford to buy your own Apple iPad, it will be difficult to get your hands on one once they are released at the Apple store.
iPhone