Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo reports that Livraria Cultura will sell the e-readers for lower prices than imported Kindles. Amazon has not officially launched in Brazil but is expected to do so by the end of this year.

Livraria Cultura, which has 14 stores in Brazil, already sells 330,000 ebooks through its website; following the partnership with Kobo, it will sell 3 million. Only 15,000 of the ebooks are in Portuguese.

Ebook sales makes up less than 1 percent of overall book sales in Brazil, but the country is believed to have huge potential for digital reading. Bowker recently found that 18 million Brazilian adults with Internet access have read an ebook.

Photo courtesy of Flickr / gaby bra

Twenty-four percent of Indian adults with Internet access have bought an e-book, Bowker’s Kelly Gallagher said in a panel at the Publishers Launch BEA conference today, and 18 percent of Brazilian adults have done so.

In predicting e-book penetration rates, it’s key not just to look at the “technology-savvy” countries, Gallagher said, but to look at the size of the overall population combined with Internet penetration rate. “Suddenly, India becomes the second largest potential market” after the U.S., he said, followed by Brazil. The UK and Australia have high Internet penetration, but their populations are small.

“The perfect storm”

Gallagher calls e “the perfect storm for publishing in emerging countries.” Here’s why:

• Growth of the middle-class economy, focused on education
• English is the universal language, at least of business. Translated works will be important, Gallagher said, but “where these readers want to go today is not in leisure reading, but primarily focused on business. And they are asking for the content in English.”
• Advancements in the online payment process (we’ve seen it in the prepaid phone card system, for instance)
• No supply chain necessary; affordable tech

Why the e-reading transition in India and Brazil is different

Here’s why the e-reading transition in India and Brazil will look different from the way it has in the U.S. and UK:

• The transition is led by professional/business and academic e-books. 80 percent of Indian e-book buyers have purchased business, professional or academic ebooks and nearly 75 percent of Brazilian e-book buyers have done so. “The education and business genres are key growth opportunities” in the BRIC countries, Gallagher said, compared to “leisure genres” driving the “traditional Anglo markets.”
• E-book buyers most often purchase e-books directly from the publisher. Amazon has a small market share (at least for now).

Most Indians and Brazilians are still reading e-books on PCs and laptops, but as e-readers become more affordable, Gallagher says BRIC countries have the potential to “leap-frog” the U.S. in e-book penetration in the next couple of years.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/gaby_bra

To be sure, this growth varied by genre, noted Bowker’s Kelly Gallagher at Digital Book World this morning. (Bowker conducted this research with the Book Industry Study Group.) E-books now make up 26 percent of adult fiction purchases, compared to 11 percent of children’s book purchases and 3 percent of cookbook purchases.

Seventy-four percent of book buyers have never bought an e-book (and 14 percent of those actually own an e-reader or tablet but choose not to use it to read e-books).

Bowker looked at the habits of “power buyers” — people who purchase four or more print or e-books per month. “Whether print or digital, publishers’ best customers now look alike,” said Gallagher.

Print power buyers make up 22 percent of the overall print book-buying population, and they drive 53 percent of print book purchases overall.

Meanwhile, e-book power buyers make up 35 percent of the overall e-book buying population, but they drive 60 percent of overall e-book purchases. In other words, about a third of the overall buyers drive two-thirds of overall purchases. Casual e-book buyers “are not pulling their weight” compared with casual print book buyers, Gallagher said.

There’s a bright spot for e-book growth: Around 7 to 12 months after buying their first e-book, 72 percent of power buyers switch over to e-books exclusively.

Overall, though, print power buyers slowed their entry into the e-book marketplace in 2011. “That’s why we didn’t see exponential growth,” Gallagher said. And beyond those power-buying voracious readers, casual e-reading is at risk: As more people buy tablets, e-reading becomes just one option among many.

The Digital Book World conference is taking place in New York this week. See all our Digital Book World coverage here.

The new data comes from two online surveys conducted by RR Bowker’s PubTrack Consumer in October and November. Bowker surveys a panel of 20,000 book-buying men, women and teens on an ongoing basis. This data is from two surveys conducted online in October and November 2011 — one of 1,000 parents of children ages 0 to 12, and one of 1,000 13- to 17-year-olds. It was presented at Publishers Launch Conferences’ “Children’s Publishing Goes Digital” this morning.

Market Basics: The overall children’s book market was $3.08 billion in 2010. E-books make up about 13 percent of sales for YA books and 11 percent of sales for children’s books.

In Q3 2011, the average price of a YA e-book was $4.72, compared to $11.41 for a YA hardcover and $7.43 for a trade paperback. The average price of a children’s e-book was $4.57, compared to $10.22 for a hardcover and $8.29 for a trade paperback.

The E-Book Market for 0- to 12-Year-Olds

»  Bricks-and-mortar bookstores are still the number-one source of discovery for children’s books, and more than 85 percent of children’s books are bought on impulse.
»  The child asking for a book in the store is the top driver of children’s book purchases; this influences 52 percent of purchases. This is “not just the kid being spoiled and throwing a tantrum,” cautioned Kristen McLean, who helped run the survey before she became the CEO of Bookigee. We’re seeing lots of evidence that families are very close, she says, and the generation gap has closed. Parents are sharing digital devices with their kids and handing devices down when they upgrade. Parents are also “paying close attention and asking good questions about what their children like.”
»  Twenty-seven percent of the kids in this survey have their own computer, 25 percent own an iPhone, 12 percent own an iPod Touch, 7 percent own an e-reader and 4 percent own an iPhone. “High-reading households are also high-technology households,” said Kelly Gallagher, Bowker’s VP of publishing services.
»  Special challenges for e-books: Respondents to an earlier 2011 survey said that only 37 percent of the children’s books in their houses were bought new, compared to 34 percent hand-me-downs, 17 percent given by others as gifts, and 9 percent borrowed from the library. It’s still virtually impossible to buy a used e-book or “hand down” an e-book, and e-book library lending, while growing, is in early stages.
»  Nearly two-thirds of book-buying parents want to see books identified by grade level or reading level. Many print books for children are identified this way, but “make sure you have a digital strategy” for indicating reading level, says McLean, and for “communicating some of those things that have been communicated very easily in print formats in the past….If they don’t see it, they don’t find it, they don’t buy it.”
»  Seventy-five percent of the parents surveyed still haven’t bought an e-book themselves, but of that group, 56 percent said they’re likely to begin reading them “soon.” Because of the trend in families sharing devices and technology, kids are more likely to start reading e-books when their parents start.
»  Kids and parents have different attitudes about e-books. Two-thirds of parents surveyed think it’s better for their kids to read in print. When asked why their kids aren’t reading print books, parents say print helps their kids focus better and that kids prefer the look and feel of print. But 7- to 12-year-old kids aren’t particularly concerned about the look and feel of e-books. They say e-books are “fun and cool,” cost less and entice them to read more.

The E-Book Market for 13- to 17-Year-Olds

»  Teens lag behind all other age groups in e-book adoption. Sixty-six percent of 13- to 17-year olds say they prefer print books to e-books, 26 percent say they have no preference and only 8 percent prefer e-books.
»  One reason for this resistance: Teens like using social technology to discuss and share things with their friends, and e-books at this point are not a social technology. An increasing number of teens surveyed says there are too many restrictions on using e-books: 14 percent said so in 2011, compared to 6 percent in 2010.
»  Don’t be misled by YA books like the Hunger Games trilogy on e-book bestseller lists: Adults make up a huge part of the audience for YA books. Thirty- to 44-year-olds account for 28 percent of YA print book sales and 32 percent of YA e-book sales. Eighteen- to 29-year-olds are the largest group of YA book buyers, accounting for 31 percent of YA print sales and 35 percent of YA e-book sales.
»  Teens (like other age groups) say the major barrier against reading on mobile devices is the size of the screen.
»  Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) products are teens’ “format of choice”; the most-owned device by teens surveyed was the iPod Touch, followed by iPhone and iPad.
»  Sixty percent of teens reported that their parents handed technology down to them, so surveys conducted after the holidays may show more teenagers owning e-readers (if their parents got new ones for Christmas).
»  Since teens are online so much, that is a great place for publishers to reach them: Teens are more likely to discover a book they purchase via a social network than any other age group.

Children’s Publishing Goes Digital is a special session at the Digital Book World conference, which is taking place in New York this week. See all our Digital Book World coverage here.

Each week, e-book journalist Charlotte Abbot (@charabbot) leads an hour-long Twitter discussion with publishing industry innovators, identified by the hashtag #followreader. Yesterday’s discussion, about e-book buyer behavior, included reps from leading book industry research organizations Book Industry Study Group and Bowker PubTrack Consumer (on Twitter here). The two companies collaborate on research about consumer attitudes toward e-book reading. Here are some of their newest findings (and their earlier findings on e-book power buyers are here):

–About 15 percent of book buyers have adopted e-books. Steve Paxhia, who wrote the report, was surprised at e-book readers’ loyalty to the format. “It turns out that when readers go digital they rarely return to print,” he said.

–E-book buyers buy more books than print book buyers. In May 2011, over 30 percent of e-book buyers said they’d increased the money they spend on books, versus 23 percent who decreased their spending. However, the increases in dollar spending are lower than the increases in units purchased–i.e., people are buying more e-books but those books may be lower-priced.

–Half of e-book buyers have been downloading free e-books. Consumers expect e-book prices to stay low or drop lower.

–Biggest inducements to buy an e-book: Free sample chapters and online reviews.

–About half of e-readers are purchased as gifts–but less than 1 percent of e-books purchased are as gifts. (Overall, 14 percent of books are purchased as gifts.)

–The study supports other research finding that women are more likely to use dedicated e-readers and men are more likely to use tablets. That reflects the genres they read, Paxhia said: E-readers are more likely to be used to read fiction (a category dominated by women) while tablets are more likely to be used to read nonfiction.

–Only 12 percent of tablet users read e-books on their tablets. Frequent e-book buyers prefer dedicated e-readers to tablets because of the portability and ease of purchase of new titles. E-readers are “focused” devices–like books. Tablets are used for multitasking.

–Barriers to widespread e-book adoption are limits on sharing, borrowing and reselling. These issues need to be addressed before more jump on the e-book bandwagon, Bowker’s Carl Kulo said. (Kindle library lending is on the way. You might see the ability to resell your e-books on Kindle roughly when hell freezes over.)

–Bowker expects the e-book market to continue to expand as devices become less expensive (Paxhia thinks we’ll see an e-reader under $99 this year) and as sharing gets easier.

The #followreader discussion is held on Twitter every Friday at 4 PM EST. (It’s been held on Thursdays in the summer but that will change next week.)