Adam Hunger/ReutersTablets at a Best Buy store in Framingham, Massachusetts.
There was no must-have toy of Christmas 2011 — for youngsters, anyway.
For adults, tablet computers and e-readers were the gifts of choice, judging by a new report that indicates the number of adults in the United States who own tablets and e-readers nearly doubled from mid-December to early January.
The report, which is expected to be released on Monday, confirms what book publishers say they have experienced in the last few weeks: a big jump in e-book sales after the holidays. A similar e-book boom came immediately after Christmas 2010.
The report, from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, found that the share of adults who owned tablet computers increased to 19 percent from 10 percent, with the same increase for adults who owned e-readers.
That was a sharp change from the period covering the middle of 2011 into the autumn, when the ownership of tablets and e-readers barely budged, the report said.
The increased ownership of tablets was especially pronounced among highly educated people with household incomes of more than $75,000. Almost one-third of people with college degrees now own tablet computers, the report said.
Women were heavier buyers of e-readers than men, a finding consistent with surveys that indicate women tend to buy more books than men.
The survey was conducted in November and December with 2,986 people aged 16 and older. Then, in January, Pew surveyed 2,008 adults 18 and older. Both surveys have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus two percentage points.
The holiday season spawned a huge marketing and advertising push for the Nook Tablet, Barnes Noble’s latest color device, and the Kindle Fire from Amazon. While many consumers bought the costlier Apple iPad at $500, tablets from Barnes Noble and Amazon cost less than $250, a more tempting price for a Christmas gift. Some black-and-white e-readers cost less than $100.
“Publishers are putting a lot of effort into e-books; apps developers are cranking out more and more tools for tablets; libraries and tech companies are making e-books easier to borrow,” Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, said in an e-mail. “So the ecosystem of these devices is making them more valuable.”
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