BISG July 2011 ebook Buying behavior

The Book Study Industry Group has been surveying book buyers on their ebook buying habits for the last few years now. In some of the preliminary pages that they released was the following graph:

Green line: % of people who read e-books daily/weekly

Blue line: % ebooks purchased (estimate)

I took away a few things from this:

• First, as I've been saying for ages now there was a dramatic shift in ebook sales for Nov and the "good times" continued through about March where sales stabilized rather than increase dramatically month to month. I saw this first in my husband's Riyria Revelations sales, which went from 1,000 sales per month in September to 10,000 a month for Nov-Feb. November was the first month that most of the "top selling" indies saw their first significant increase in sales including: Hocking, Locke, and Konrath
  
  



• Second, in 2009 ebooks had not crossed over to the mainstream in anyway and for most of 2009 (including the X-mas season) remained relatively flat
  
  



• Third, April - June seems relatively level at about 13% - I suspect when we get this data next year it will show relatively flat until about October in which case I think we'll see similar rises as last Xmas season.

The report also reported that ebook sales in Q1 2011 showed 13% of total book sales (based on Bowker Pub-Track's survey of 6,000 US book buyers.