The Kindle Index

Unless I'm totally mis-understanding their data gathering, this post seems completely wrongheaded (or at the least, willfully ignorant and self-serving.)<p>They're indexing the popularity of e-readers in different MSAs by looking at how many are for sale on secondary markets, as a % of what's for sale on the secondary markets in that city. This seems like a really poor proxy for how popular e-readers are in those locations.<p>There are several things they're not correcting for:<p>* The more someone uses their e-reader, the less likely it is to end up on a secondary market - either because you're using it, or you still intend to use it, or you broke it. (This is what happened to my last Kindle - I used it heavily, but eventually something in my bag rammed into the screen and broke it to a point it was unsaleable.)<p>* Some cities may have a larger volume of items per-capita on a secondary market because people have more to sell. E.g. if you have a larger house with a garage, you probably have more items to potentially resell than someone with a tiny apartment.<p>* Cities with a lower proportion of smartphone / tablet users might buy more kindles. That doesn't mean they're consuming fewer ebooks.

I wonder if the reason that there are so few e-readers for sale is because their use-case doesn't really change. In other words, they remain useful for much longer.<p>This might make people hold onto them instead of constantly upgrading to the latest version.

&#62;Kindles and Nooks aren’t really competing against each other so much as both of them are holding on for dear life versus the iPad<p>...except that Kindles and Nooks aren't trying to compete with the iPad, being completely different types of devices for completely different primary purposes.

Here's an interesting dimension to look at: prevalence of e-readers (and iPads etc) vs mass transit use. My train to work in the morning is stuffed with people using various hand-held non-phone devices; I can't imagine they'd be as popular with car commuters :)<p>Another (silly) one: e-readers vs holidays taken in hot places. Maybe people don't buy e-readers in California because they're already somewhere sunny, so they don't take beach holidays? ;)

Would be better with some more data.<p>Ex: Overall literacy rates: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States</a><p>"In 2011, the National Institute for Literacy estimated that 47 percent of adults in Detroit, Michigan are "functionally illiterate," meaning they have trouble with reading, speaking, writing and computational skills."<p>So Detroit is not likely to be a hotspot for ereader sales.<p>Also data from Amazon: (books, magazines and newspapers purchased per capita)<p>1. Cambridge, Mass.<p>2. Alexandria, Va.<p>3. Berkeley, Calif.<p>4. Ann Arbor, Mich.<p>5. Boulder, Colo.<p>6. Miami<p>7. Salt Lake City<p>8. Gainesville, Fla.<p>9. Seattle<p>10. Arlington, Va.<p>11. Knoxville, Tenn.<p>12. Orlando, Fla.<p>13. Pittsburgh<p>14. Washington, D.C.<p>15. Bellevue, Wash.<p>16. Columbia, S.C.<p>17. St. Louis, Mo.<p>18. Cincinnati<p>19. Portland, Ore.<p>20. Atlanta<p>source: <a href="http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&#38;p=irol-newsArticle&#38;ID=1568187&#38;highlight=" rel="nofollow">http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&#38;p=iro...</a>

I can't help but wonder if the prevalence of Kindles in a particular city relates to the number of brick and mortar bookstores in that city. I am imagining that the more "cosmopolitan" cities probably have more physical bookstores.

Interesting. Since I believe the underlying data for market share is for US re-sales of the hardware I would be interested in how adding international data would fare. Kobo is a Canadian company as is rumored to have a significant share of the international e-reader market.<p>I'm also curious if, since the stats are based on devices being for re-sale if the cities near the top have batter local economies and more people are selling old devices to upgrade to newer ones where in an area with more economic uncertainty folks might be holding on to their current electronics longer and not upgrading as often.<p>In the interest of full disclosure, we have three Kobo e-readers in the family (Borders liquidation sale $50 each).

Go Ann Arbor! Ironic, considering that was the former headquarters of Borders.

As best I can tell, this article looks at resale data on e-readers and attempts to extrapolate that to use of e-readers. I doubt this extrapolation is appropriate. If, for instance, e-reader use was a constant proportion in all the cities, and the proportion of users who resell their e-reader was a constant proportion, but the proportion of users who resell their TVs was higher in the non "cultured" cities, using the authors' logic you would incorrectly reach the conclusion that the non "cultured" cities have greater e-reader adoption.

I just think it's a bit bizarre to use sales of dedicated reading technology as a proxy for books read. As has been pointed out here, there's a lot of not-so-dedicated tech that can read e-books. Plus, you know, there are books. Major metro areas still support great independent book stores. Places out in the hinterlands don't, which means that downloadability is a bigger factor.<p>Anyway, seems to me that if we really cared about literacy, we'd want a random sample of peeps asked how many books they read last month, not what hardware/software they have on which books might potentially be read!

I'd be curious to see the data if iPads were consider e-Readers. Then also to see it if iPhones were also added.<p>I own a kindle, but rarely use it b/c between my iPad and iPhone (with the respective kindle apps and other e-Reader apps) there is rarely a reason to carry along the Kindle.<p>One exception might be if I were going on a long trek in the wildnerness where the extra battery life of e-ink and the kindle offered a significant advantage (along with an absence of network connectivity which would diminis the advantages of the IOS devices).

What annoyed me the most in this post is not the lame analysis, it is the assumption that all readers are US citizens. No printable words can describe this.

iOS and Android have a Kindle app, which means every iPhone, iPad, and Android device can also be a Kindle. This fact is conspicuously missing in the analysis.