Michael Tamblyn might be the new CEO of Kobo, but that hasn’t stopped him from patrolling the digital publishing circuit. Yesterday at the IPG Spring Conference he dropped a bombshell, Tamblyn admitted that 50% of all Kobo customers are 55 years old or retired.
“People 55 and over are leading a digital charge for the first time”, he said. “That kind of understanding of what that customer looks like changes everything for us.”
Tamblyn said he was not worried about the demographic featuring mainly older people as “it seems more like there are times when people have more time in their life to read, and time when they don’t. It’s a conveyor belt that brings new recruits all the time. People make more time for reading as they get older.”
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
