E-Reader Domination Proceeding Slowly
February 13, 2014
Could this be good news for Barnes & Noble? TheNextWeb reveals that our transition from dead-tree tomes is just beginning in, “Pew: 69% of Americans Read a Print Book in 2013, 28% Read an E-Book, But Only 4% Went Exclusively Electronic.” The numbers come from Pew‘s ongoing Internet & American Life survey. Reporter Emil Protalinski writes:
“As you can see, while e-books are becoming more popular, print is still king. Most people who read e-books also read print books, and only 4 percent of readers were ‘e-book only’ in 2013. As e-books become available on more devices (not just e-readers), their use is expected to continue growing. Americans increasingly own their own e-readers, tablets, and smartphones, all of which e-books can be consumed on.”
The same survey also revealed that 14 percent of us listened to an audiobook last year, and, interestingly, that those “readers” consumed a wider range of content than others. The article also tells us:
“Overall, 76 percent of adults read a book in some format over the previous 12 months. The mean number of books read or listened to in the past year was 12 and the median number was five (meaning that half of adults read more than five books and half read fewer). The median is a better measure of what the ‘typical’ American’s reading habits look like since the mean can be skewed by a relatively small number of very avid readers.”
Only five books in a year? How sad. I suppose I must be one of those avid readers to which Protalinski refers. The study was conducted in the first week of this year, and quizzed 1,005 American adults; the margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. The report can be e-consumed here [PDF] in all its twenty-page glory.
Cynthia Murrell, February 13, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
