E-Book Rentals Survey: Price Not Currently a Big Issue

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Posted Feb 18, 2014

E-books have been around for years and have steadily gained popularity. At first, most were only available for sale on e-readers or online. But now there are several services offering e-book rentals for discounted prices. How many have taken advantage of e-book rentals? And how could this change in the future?

ebook rentals

E-Book Readers

In Ask Your Target Market’s latest survey, 17% of respondents said they often read e-books. 19% said they sometimes read e-books. Another 19% said they rarely read e-books. And 45% said they never read them. There are lots of different devices people can use to read e-books. The most popular, however, is just a standard computer. 48% said they have read e-books on a computer. 40% have read them on a tablet. 35% said they own dedicated e-readers. And 32% have used their smartphones to read e-books.

E-Book Rentals

Buying e-books still seems to be the most common way people obtain them. But renting can be a cheaper option, so how much of an issue is the cost of e-books? 22% of e-book readers said they think the price of buying e-books is very reasonable. And 46% think the cost of e-books is somewhat reasonable. 14% think the cost is somewhat unreasonable. And just 5% think they are very unreasonable. 13% of readers have never actually purchased any e-books.There’s still a cost associated with renting e-books sometimes, but it’s usually as much. And in general it’s not a very common practice quite yet. Just 7% of e-book readers said they always choose to rent them. 10% said they sometimes rent e-books. 12% said they’ve rented e-books just once or twice. And 70% have never rented e-books.

Book Rentals

But the concept of renting books in general isn’t a new one. 16% of overall respondents said they often rent books from their local library. 26% said they sometimes check out books from the library. Another 26% said they rarely rent real books from a local library. And 32% said they never do. You can view the complete survey results in the widget below and be sure to click “Open Full Report” to take advantage of all the chart and filter options.Photo Credit: Amazon Kindle eBook Reader from FlickrWhat do you want to know? If you need some consumer insights on a particular topic, let us know in the comments below and we’ll consider it for an upcoming survey post.

Results were collected on February 16 via AYTM’s online survey panel.