Are Most Amazon Kindle Owners Only Young At Heart?

Technology news reporter David Carnoy at CNET was the one who originally posted to Amazon's Kindle forums two months ago, trying to find out just what kind of age demographics the Kindle was attracting. Carnoy on Thursday updated his discussion, saying someone—the aforementioned contributor—had collected the responses to Carnoy's query, and found that nearly two-thirds of Kindle users who responded were age 40 or older.

The most responses (23 percent) came from people who stated their age as 50 to 59. Kindle users aged 40 to 49 make up 19.5 percent, as to users in the 60 to 69 range, at another 19.5 percent. Two percent of Kindle users who responded are over age 80, and the 70 percent to 79 percent contingent makes up 6 percent.

While the results are hardly anything to base a case on—Amazon itself has declined to reveal sales figures on Kindle, let alone data on what type of people are buying it—there are a few reasons why the dominance of older Kindle users could indeed be the case. The cost of a Kindle, currently $359 for the device alone, is prohibitive to younger users without disposable income, for example.

The Kindle's form factor and adjustable display have also been a hit with older users who have a hard time holding heavy devices or reading small type. When Channelweb solicited comments from Kindle users back in February after the device's launch, we heard from several readers who stated their ages as over 40 and sent comments such as "the Kindle is my answer and I think will also be so for others."

Amazon, which has been a busy bee this week already thanks to its purchase of Stanza maker Lexcycle, also debuted a few changes to the Kindle's Personal Document Service (via Whispernet).

Starting May 4, said Amazon in a blog post Wednesday, Kindle users will be able to view and transfer documents using Microsoft Word 2007 docx and RTF file formats in addition to the many formats (such as DOC, HTML, JPEG, GIF, BMP, TXT and others) that Kindle supports already.

"If you would like to download your personal documents for free, or if you are not in a wireless area, you can continue to send attachments to "name"@free.kindle.com to be converted," wrote Amazon. "These documents will be e-mailed to your computer at the e-mail address associated with your Amazon.com account login."