Consumers' behaviour & preferences
Reading habit
Reading is quite common the UK. The figure here below illustrate the enjoyment of reading amongst the general UK population. One can notice that about 75% of the population enjoy reading “very much” or “quite a lot”.
While the online stores’ market share is increasing in the UK, the share of the “brick-and-
mortar” shops is still much higher (2013) as can be seen in the figure here below:
Age & Gender
Given the nature of the data available for the United Kingdom, we will analyze the reading habits depending on age and gender simultaneously.
According to the statistics available on Statista (2016 : Enjoyment of reading books in England, 2013 by age and gender) (see figure 5), it is clear that women are heavier reader than men in the UK. Also, one can notice that the heaviest readers can be found amongst the women older than 30 years old.
Social category
Regarding the social category, one can note that the higher people are in the social hierarchy, the more they like reading as can be seen here below (Statista, 2016 : Enjoyment or reading books in England (2013), by socio-economic group):
A: High managerial, administrative or professional;
B: Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional;
C1: Supervisory, clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional;
C2: Skilled manual workers
D: Semi and unskilled manual workers;
E: state pensioners, casual or lowest grade workers, unemployed with state benefits only.
Comparing the situation in the UK with other European countries, it is worth noting that the Internet sales are quite high with 40% of the sales.
Distribution channels
Also, according to the information available on Statista (2016, Time spent reading among young people in the United Kingdom (2010-2014)), only 5.2% of young people never read (data from 2014) in the UK while more than 50% on young people read more than 30 minutes a day.
