Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
I don't think that there are many "social" readers at all. Almost everyone who reads reads for personal reasons.
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There are social readers--but not for ebooks. Book clubs often have a few people who enjoy the social aspects more than the actual book-reading. They read because their friends are reading; if the friends switched to knitting, they'd get together and swap patterns instead.
But ebooks don't work well as social foci; there's no lending a finished copy to the person who can't afford it this month (there's often no *buying* them a copy, either); the formatting is drastically different based on device, so there's no "let's talk about the awful scene on page 187," and even finding things by chapter is troublesome; there's no "just flip through to chapter 8;" the publisher has to have set up the TOC properly, and many fiction books don't have that.
There's no ebook that gets handed around the office because it has a chapter that takes place in the diner they all like. No book a teacher loans out to the whole class, because the first four readers made a club based on some of the events in the book.
The lack of social aspects to ebookery is one of the things publishers should *really* be worrying about; that's what's going to fragment the market worse than the way TV has fragmented.