• by Aaron Baar , December 8, 2010

People may talk about their iPads an awful lot. But when it comes to e-readers, they love their Kindles.

According to NetBase's Brand Passion Index, which measures consumers' passion for brands expressed via social media, people had a lot to say about Apple's iPad (it was the topic of more than 90% of all discussions surrounding e-readers), but their responses were all over the map. Among some of the criticisms of the iPad were its backlit screen (which makes it hard to read in sunlight) and its size, says Lisa Joy Rosner, NetBase's chief marketing officer.

"The one that has the loudest voice is the iPad," she tells Marketing Daily. "But the feelings about it are all over the place."

(For the purposes of this index, NetBase limited the results to e-readers, filtering out the iPad's other functions that may have boosted consumer affinity, Rosner admits.)

At the same time, Amazon's Kindle produced a much greater affinity among social media chatter. According to NetBase, 87% of the chatter around the Kindle -- of which there was significantly less than Apple's iPad -- expressed emotions of liking or loving it. Some of the main reasons were its singular functionality (it does one thing well) and its size, which is small enough to fit in a purse or large pocket, Rosner says.

"What we found is one of the things they love about the Kindle is how sleek the design is and that it fits everywhere," she says.

And though users of Sony's Reader had only positive things to say about the device, there was surprisingly little social media chatter about it, demonstrating how it's a bit of an afterthought when it comes to e-readers. "When people talk about them, they talk about them very lovingly. There was no hate in their chatter," Rosner says. "But there was not a lot of conversation around them."