On the day of Apple’s Tablet announcement, I got to thinking: what current e-reader is more popular? Outside of sales, which would probably skew in the favor of Amazon’s Kindle because Barnes & Noble’s Nook was only released in November, I thought a good gauge of popularity would be to track online media mentions of each e-reader. For the data, I went to Pinyadda’s index and scanned article titles for “Kindle” and then “Nook”. The results were somewhat surprising to me:
Of the sites we index since January 1st, 2010, Amazon’s Kindle was mentioned almost 38X more than Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The Kindle’s 383 article title mentions were not all singing praises, however.
In June 2009, Arizona State University enacted a pilot program to distribute Kindles to its student body. No sooner after the program’s launch was ASU hit with a joint lawsuit by The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind, claiming that the program was in clear violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The threat of a lawsuit was enough for ASU to pull the program in mid-January of 2010.
The amount of press generated by ASU’s announcement accounted for almost 14 percent of the Kindle’s article mentions in January, 2010. Even after excluding these articles the Kindle still holds a dominating lead over the Nook with respect to article title mentions. But the ASU bad press surrounding the Kindle–in addition to the debut of the tablet–can’t be helping first-quarter sales.
Interesting side-note: When searching Pinyadda’s index for “Nook”, article titles with “Snooki” were almost 15X more prevalent.