Vanity Fair

Yesterday I spotted my 3^rd Sony Reader in the wild. This time it was being used by a woman in her 20s on the train.

So already my insignificant statistics have been proven worthless. It seems that it isn't just men indulging their stereotypical love of gadgets who have Sony Readers.

However the woman on the train was reading Vanity Fair which almost certainly is one of the free texts on the Sony Reader and this I believe strengthens my supposition that Sony Readers are being used as the best and cheapest way for avid readers to get their hands on 100 classics that they would otherwise not buy or read. After all, 100 classics from Wordsworth would cost you £250 - £25 more than the Sony Reader and they'd take up a whole lot of space. If you just want to tick off the classics on your read list – this must be the way to do it.

So will these Reader owners ever get through these 100 titles and the 26,000 available at Project Gutenberg and actually buy an ebook? I'm beginning to have my doubts.

It seems there are other Reader owners out there who have yet to buy an ebook. Scott Pack is interviewed today on the North Meadow Media blog and claims not to have bought an ebook yet for his Sony Reader, though he has speculated on ebook sales.

Perhaps for the publishing world, Waterstone's announcement that they've sold 30,000 Readers isn't as significant as I thought. What we really need are some figures on their sales of ebooks.