Mobiles ’round the world: Figures that may surprise you
Did you ever stop to think how many mobile phones are in use in the world? Do you have a guess at the number?
Try "four billion subscriptions." By comparison, the entire population of the world is estimated at 6.6 billion people (or 6.75 if you go by Wikipedia). Of course, some people will have more than one phone subscription, but still, that’s a very impressive number. Of course, this does include all cellphones, from the oldest still in use to the very latest smartphone, but this article on the Communities Dominate Brands blog breaks the figures down further with a lot of statistics.
The statistic probably of most interest to TeleReaders is that fully 10% of those mobile devices are "smartphones." Not all of those are necessarily "smart" enough to be made to read e-books, but even if only 3 out of 4 are, there’s a potential audience of three hundred million. Even if only 1% of compatible smartphone users are interested in reading e-books, that would still be three million people. Perhaps this is why Amazon is making noises about extending Kindle support to them.
The article points out that "[m]obile is the newest and least understood mass media channel," whose content industry was worth 71 billion dollars at the end of 2008—comparable in size to the Internet and global radio broadcasting industry. "DVD sales and rentals worldwide of all movies and TV content is slightly bigger at about 80 Billion which is also the value of the worldwide coffee industry. But mobile achieved this in just ten years[…]" Although I doubt the total revenue involved would make up more than a drop in that 71 billion dollar bucket, surely some of that content must be e-books.
The article goes into some detail about the implications of mobile as a mass medium—a medium in which 3.9 billion people could theoretically be reached by SMS text message—three times as many as can be reached by email! Not all of it has implications for e-books, of course, but as the mobile market increases, do does the number of people who can read e-books on them.
For myself, I am amazed at the capabilities of my own phone. I do not have what is commonly considered a "smartphone"—just a Motorola RAZR2v9. But it can still send text messages, check and send Gmail, browse the web (slowly, with a simplified browser—but then, I cut my teeth on Lynx, so simplified browsing is fine with me), snap and email photos (such as the "cellf portrait" at upper left), Twitter, and otherwise keep myself entertained.
I can even listen to music (or at least I could, until I lost the mini-USB-to-earphone-jack dongle). I can get cellular video, such as the latest updates from CNN. (I almost never actually do it, it’s basically just a toy. But I could, as often as I wanted to.) Oh, and I can call people, too.
But how many people use the mobile Internet? The answer is, in the Developing World, and in high-bandwidth countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, lots of them—in fact, more than access the Internet by PC. In developing nations such as those in Africa, the cell phone is a lot more affordable than a PC, and will be the only Internet device many people have. (Certainly a lot more people have a mobile phone than have an OLPC!)
And as I’ve just pointed out, even phones that aren’t nominally "smart" can still do a lot of browsing. Even though it’s smaller in size, the display on my cell phone is comparable in resolution to the display on my old Palm Pilot.
If e-book readers can be ported over to non-smart phones, as Mobipocket is trying to do, it could provide a new means of information access to people in those countries. Of course, the question remains whether they actually would use it. If you build it, they will not necessarily come. But as the facts and figures in the Communities article show, they sure are using a lot of other mobile features.
Leave a Reply