CYBERJAYA: Millions of Malaysians who on normal days would be out working, are now staying home due to the Movement Control Order (MCO), and in the process have embraced technology.
Many are now turning to e-books as they can't hit the bookstores or go to libraries.
According to Xentral Methods Sdn Bhd (XMSB), the entity behind e-Sentral.com, the biggest e-book player in Malaysia, demand for e-books soared since the start of the MCO.
XMSB’s Managing Director Faiz Al-Shahab said since the beginning of the MCO on March 18, e-Sentral’s cloud server daily traffic had tripled, whereas e-book sales have, on the average, quadrupled between March 18 and 29.
He adds that e-Sentral’s big data and biblionomics analysis can demonstrate in detail the drastic increment in e-book usage.
“With reference to e-Sentral’s big data analysis, throughout the MCO, Malaysian readers consumed up to 870 thousand pages per day.
“On the average, Malaysians are using 2,700 hours of their time reading on the e-Sentral application, a massive jump if compared to the regular 500 – 700 hours of reading consumption on the days before the MCO”, Faiz said in a statement today.
The 40-year-old said XMSB was quite pleased that the culture of reading is being kept alive via the e-Sentral application during the pandemic period which saw the closure of schools and universities, as well as the Kuala Lumpur Book Fair being postponed.
According to the breakdown of e-Sentral’s statistics, most desirable literature categories are romance and general novel.
Faiz said other categories that are heavily downloaded are family and health, crime stories, teen novels, and also religion, specifically Islam.
These trends are predictable, except for the category of family and health which saw a unique increase during the MCO, he revealed.
E-Sentral also shared their demographic breakdown of users during the MCO, which signifies female readers dominating the share of reading by a fair distance.
Age group wise, those from 35 to 44 years old were ranked as the highest readers, followed by the age group of 18 – 24 years old. The age group of 25 to 34 comes third as heavy users of e-books during the MCO.