The Impact of E-Readers on Reading Habits

Part 1: Background and Basics

The question of “how do tablets change the information to which people are exposed” being so humongous, it was necessary to cut it into little tractable slices. The most obvious of course (while still entirely enormous) was looking at e-book buying and reading habits in the United States, and how they looked next to regular book buying and reading habits.

Difficulties

The first problem with attempting to do this was with a lack of data of two different types. One was of research on the impacts of e-readers generally; the Kindle, the first widely-purchased one, was only put on the market in 2007 and the first iPad came to market an even briefer 13 months ago, in April of 2010. Thus while there are compelling anecdotes of children whose love of reading seems to have been saved by these devices, there has simply not been the time to produce rigorous longitudinal studies of their habits. Meaning, perhaps the kids get really into the devices, but lose interest much faster as well, and never reach the same level of literacy as children who were brought up entirely on tree-ware books.

The other major difficulty was in the sheer difficulty of collecting data on analog reading habits. As numerous cantankerous forum-posters (such as myself) have complained, just because people BUY a book isn’t anything like a guarantee that they will READ it. However it being for all intents and purpose impossible to tell if people who buy real books have read them or not, and it being totally possible to tell if people have read e-books or not but that’s creepy and Amazon would probably prefer you didn’t know they could know, we have to go entirely with purchasing data.

That Of Which We Can Be Moderately Confident

A study was performed by Jakob Nielsen on the speed with which texts were read on iPad’s Kindles, and book-books. The results found real books to confidently be faster to read than the devices, by a margin that was between 6 and 10 percent (with 6.2% slower recorded for the iPad and 10.7% for the Kindle but sufficiently large error bars on both of these to make the difference between them not reliably significant). To make that more empathizable, that means that an hour of reading from a paper tome would take about 65 minutes on a tablet.

Some of the more difficult-seeming to dispute conclusions discovered were a short but lively list of statistics:

  • E-book sales now constitute 6% of the consumer market
  • Amazon now sells 143 e-books for every hardcover, BUT —
  • The hardcover market is still up 22% this year.

So so far, e-books are looking pretty good.

However.

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