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Paypal’s New eBook Report: Consumers Are More Willing to Pay for eBooks Than Video Games

Paypal released the results of multi-nation survey this week, and it showed that consumers' reading habits, device preferences, and willingness to pay for content can change drastically as you cross international borders.

You can find the global report (more like a collection of slides) here as a PDF. There’s also a US-centric report (PDF). A few details which jumped out at me were the disparities in devices used for reading.

You can almost tell which countries have gone to a post-ereader market based on this chart. France has, and so has the US, but UK, Germany, and Spain have note.

papypal-ebook-survey

The survey report also showed that in some countries consumers were more willing to buy ebooks than to buy games on in-game purchases.

Alas, while it sounds great that consumers are more willing to spend on ebooks, that doesn’t actually mena they are willing to spend _more_ than they would on games.

In fact, the average spent on games was universally higher than for ebooks:

When buying ebooks, Americans were most likely to buy thrillers, SF&F, and romance (which we already knew were the three most popular ebook genres).

And of course consumers were most likely to buy from Amazon.

 

 

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Comments


Simon November 2, 2016 um 3:20 pm

I’m not sure if too much should be read into average spending being higher on video games than books.

Every video game, except the very, very smallest requires a team to make, whereas indie ebooks are typically a one-man show, with some contracted labour. So this means the price of the average game has to be higher to pay all those involved. The typical price for a decent indie game on Steam is usually $15 vs. say $5 for the typical indie ebook.

Then you have the AAA video games which are now getting north of $60 compared with the average Big 5 pubbed ebook at just north of $10.

(Indie game makers also contract labour like indie ebookers do, but, for example, games usually require much more art than the single contracted cover need for an ebook).


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