Quote:
Originally Posted by sjfan
I'm pro e-reader, but that idea that 19% of adults use one (in the sense of a dedicated device that this article is positing—it purports to exclude phones, tablets, and other multi-purpose devices from the e-reader category) doesn't pass the smell test to me.
I work in a tech company of mostly 40+ year olds, which is going to skew far more tech-heavy than the general population and far more reading-heavy than the younger population. I'd be shocked if even 10% of my (almost certainly overrepresented) world owns a dedicated e-reader.
I mean, they also say that 3/4 of adults read at most a single book in the past year (and most of those either none or only a part of one), so that's positing that either 80% of people who read more than one book have a dedicated e-reader, or that vast numbers of people who don't really read books buy dedicated e-readers. The numbers just don't make sense when considered together. Something's rotten.
The biggest problem with this sort of survey is that if you get people on the phone and ask them if they own an e-reader, a bunch of people who read books on their tablets and phones are going to say yes. And a bunch will say no. And that's legit. But it means that using that sort of survey to draw conclusions about the ownership of dedicated e-readers (as opposed to multi-purpose phones/tablets/etc) is impossible unless you've got very clear phrasing and controls.
There's also the possibility that the total number of e-readers is being divided by the population without regard to people who own multiple readers, and of a Bradley sort of effect where people think it's positive/prestigious to over-represent their reading and so give false positives in polls.
Pew is a very reputable polling company and they're usually good about publishing the exact phrasing used in their surveys (so I'd normally suspect the mass media article of misinterpreting their results, perhaps unintentionally, rather than Pew portraying things wrongly), but in this case I hunted around a bit and couldn't find the survey questions asked.
Whatever the case is, the fact that an article would cite a study claiming that 1 in 5 adults own readers as evidence of their demise is enough to discredit it entirely. Maybe e-readers are dying, maybe they aren't, but the statistics here are so bizarre that they can't really be taken as proof of anything. |
You mentioned some good points here - and I have to agree with you - when doing a survey it really comes down on how you phrase the questions to make sure the participants have the right understanding of the question so that there is no distortion of the results.