Twenty percent of digital book buyers surveyed by the Book Industry Study Group had stopped buying print editions in the previous year, according to highlights of BISG’s Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading the study released last week.  We’re not sure what’s more significant in those results--that 20% had stopped buying print, or that 80% hadn’t.   At the other end of the spectrum, 81% of respondents said they purchased e-books only “rarely” or ‘occasionally.”

It’s apparently all about price, with a majority of print book buyers saying that “affordability” was the #1 reason they’d consider buying an e-book instead of a print edition.  And

E-book buyers would prefer to read books on their computers (47%).  Kindles were the #1 e-book reader, with around a 32% preference rate.  It wasn’t clear whether iPhones were offered as an option, or if the survey was limited to single-use devices. 

The respondents were e-book buyers (within the previous year, or owning an e-book reader) drawn from a panel of print book consumers surveyed regularly by R.R. Bowker.

This was the first of three studies on e-reading to be released by the BISG this year.