MacJoyful

Readers And Their Ereaders

Since I’m a technophile, an article on reading and specifically about readers using digital media is of reasonable interest to me. Personally, I tend to prefer reading e-books (using my iPad) because of the auxiliary resources easily available to me. For example, highlighting a word to learn its definition and/or synonym is much quicker on my iPad than if I were using print media. Sharing my book with friends via Twitter, Goodreads.com or Facebook is something I enjoy. So highlighting a passage and tweeting about it is far easier (i.e., no typing required) and more likely to happen when I’m reading via my iPad. Sharing while reading on a computing device is nearly instantaneous.

I mean, think about it. Even if you have a tablet or computer handy, how likely is it you’ll stop reading your printed book, access your device to bring up a browser page, enter terms to commence a search for definitions or more information about the book’s subject matter?

Book

I found a recent study by Pew on the subject of the increase in e-reading to be informative and enlightening. The results of the study is many pages long containing several sections on the who, what, when and where of readers and the things they are reading – if at all. It’s interesting to note that reading eBooks actually increases reading in general. Check it out:

The differences among e-book reading device owners is the last section in the study. There is a ton of information available beyond the small area I’ve touched on in this post.

 

4 comments

  1. Thanks for posting this interesting article. I’ll have to look more fully at the sample sizes and how the study was conducted, but it is an interesting read. I do find that some customers who come into the bookstore I work at confess, when I ask if I can help them, their intention to go home and buy the eBook. They generally feel embarrassed to accept my help because they have no intention of buying a hard copy of a book. I still give them recommendations based on what they’ve enjoyed in the past. I’m sure there are others who don’t confess their intentions, so I appreciate the ones who do.

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  2. I read either format but do like the convenience of quickly looking up information when reading from my iPad. I don’t think one format is better than another. As long as people are reading that’s the main issue. Uninformed citizens is part of the problems we see in society. If young adults are getting new from TV shows on the Cartoon Network, what does that say about the future? So, I’m all for encouraging folks to read. Availability along with accessibility is part of the equation.

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  3. That’s an excellent remark! My problem with using my e-reader is that I start to highlight grammatical errors and make recommendations! Lol. OCD?

    Regarding citizens being informed, I’ve found that watching the news on television isn’t always that informative. How much information is included may also depend on what country it’s being broadcast from. These two-minute reports that news stations feel people have the attention span for don’t do much for me. They can, however, be useful as a prompt to look up more information.

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  4. It appears we have something in common. I do highlight typos and a couple authors were receptive to having me send a list of them to be corrected. I’m definitely OCD not clinically but I do obsess compulsively on occasion.

    As far as keeping up with current events I do so through aggregating sources via the Internet. Obviously, it’s important to have reliable and trustworthy sources and I believe a combination giving more than one side is good but not always possible. Twitter helps me in that I can quickly see hot topics for the day and go to the links and read more. I have health issues that prevent me from sitting longer than 30 minutes so TV watching (news or otherwise) is kept to a minimum. That has allowed me to have more time reading. I do agree that the news networks offer inadequate amounts of information selected by committee of editors based more on bottom line concerns than the good of those they claim to serve.

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