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Originally Posted by ZodWallop
Thanks for the article. if nothing else, it reminded me that The Red And The Black and Moby Dick have been on my TBR pile for too long.
I see several people in the break area at work reading on Kindles. One with a Voyage, the others, Paperwhites. I see a few people that read on their tablets, but the folks here that are real readers all use e-ink (in fact, they all use Kindles, except for me).
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While I don’t know the details of your work environment, I’d just point out that if someone is reading on a Kindle, even if they are some distance away, you know they are reading. If they are involved with their phone, they could be reading, or they could be doing a thousand other things. You cannot know unless you’re close enough to see the screen and see how they are interacting with it.
When I ride on commuter train, virtually everyone has a device they are looking at. A few of those are Kindles (if there are 60 people on a train car, maybe 3 have Kindles). Surely there are more than 3 of the other 57 people reading on their phone. I myself use my phone to read when I’m on the train, it is just a lot easier to manage. I don’t see any Kindles at work (tech company).
I would not trust any polls or studies that attempt to measure proportion of reading on phones vs dedicated reading devices, as there are too many variables to control for. My guess is that it is at least 3 to 1, probably much more.
Amazon knows, but it would be creepy of them to disclose that information. But they appear to put as much or more effort into the iOS and Android apps as they do with Kindle - they get updated at least monthly and new features usually appear on them first.
I think it is kind of an accident that there are e-ink screens, and that they happen to be very suitable for reading text (and not much else), and that they are (now) cheap. But I don’t see a bright future for dedicated reading devices. They exist on an increasingly isolated ‘fitness peak’.