eBook News

First and foremost I want to thank the Pew Internet project for collecting and disseminating information about ebooks and reading. I love the data itself, I just always want more.  Whenever I read articles about reading habits and devices, I always wonder not just about the devices (or no device) that people are reading from, but I also wonder about the people being questioned about how much that they read. I see statements like the "more than 8 in 10 Americans ages 16-29 read a book in the past year and 6 in 10 used their local public library" and it makes me think about other questions. I remember when I was at the Butterfly exhibit in Gainesville, and the docent mentioned that this was the second largest butterfly habitat in the world, well the next words that I said (and at least three others at the same time) was "what is the largest?" So when I see something that mentions that 8 out of 10 people read a book that year, I wonder "at...

In mid-January PEW for the last few years has been running a survey to find out about people having an ereader or a tablet. To me it always looks like geometric growth, in other words, we have moved out of Chris Anderson's long tail concept and are now in the "mainstream," with ebooks and tablets. Over the last three years, each year the number of tablets in use have just about doubled, from 5% in 2010, to 10% in 2011, and now 19% in 2012. And ereaders are pretty much the same (10% in 2011 and 19% in 2012). I also think that when you put readers and tablets together it becomes even more impressive, as of January 2012 it is estimated at 29% of adults have either a tablet or a reader. Then of course there are people like me, who have multiples of each that we work and experiment with (although PEW never calls me). I know to many when they read numbers like 5%, they thought it was no big deal, it's a rarity, but that is hard to continue to say when numbers become somethi...