Is the ereader dead?

[barryem]

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 live in a retirement home in rural Arkansas, which is surely not very representative of the reading population. I've been here for 13 years. I use an ereader and currently I'd guess that 20% of the people living here use ereaders. I bought most of them for them so I'm fairly sure about that. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if it was 25%.

My guess is that there are fewer ereader users in rural Arkansas than in most places although we probably have more here because I make sure people who read know about them and help them find a way to get one.

So based on this small, highly inaccurate and not representative sample I'd say 19% doesn't seem unreasonable.

Barry

[barryem]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Living in Houston, there's a solid four days a year that aren't murderously hot or have hurricanes blowing through, that I can sit on a bench at the park comfortably reading in the sun. I tend to take full advantage of them.

I lived most of my life in Houston, mostly in the Montrose area. I can't recall the name of the park on Montrose just a few blocks before you get to the fountain, but I bet I've sat there under a tree reading a thousand times in the over 50 years I lived around there.

Yes Houston gets hot but I was also in the Houston Bike Club, riding 10 speeds all over that part of Texas on weekends so heat just didn't mean that much to me. I'd find some shade and read very happily.

I live now in Arkansas and I'm older and less healthy and it's just as hot here in the summer although the season is shorter and the humidity not nearly as high. I still read outdoors when I can, which is less often now that I'm older, but I still enjoy it as much.

Reading outside is wonderful. I did it since I was a teen. I never got skin cancer and I spent a lot of my life in the sun. Life can be good if you let it be.

Barry

[sebibeck]

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.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by barryem

I lived most of my life in Houston, mostly in the Montrose area. I can't recall the name of the park on Montrose just a few blocks before you get to the fountain, but I bet I've sat there under a tree reading a thousand times in the over 50 years I lived around there.

Yes Houston gets hot but I was also in the Houston Bike Club, riding 10 speeds all over that part of Texas on weekends so heat just didn't mean that much to me. I'd find some shade and read very happily.

I live now in Arkansas and I'm older and less healthy and it's just as hot here in the summer although the season is shorter and the humidity not nearly as high. I still read outdoors when I can, which is less often now that I'm older, but I still enjoy it as much.

Reading outside is wonderful. I did it since I was a teen. I never got skin cancer and I spent a lot of my life in the sun. Life can be good if you let it be.

Barry

It's the humidity here that kills me. When I go to visit my mom in Arizona, it can be hotter there than here, but without the humidity it feels a lot better.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by barryem

I lived most of my life in Houston, mostly in the Montrose area. I can't recall the name of the park on Montrose just a few blocks before you get to the fountain, but I bet I've sat there under a tree reading a thousand times in the over 50 years I lived around there.

Yes Houston gets hot but I was also in the Houston Bike Club, riding 10 speeds all over that part of Texas on weekends so heat just didn't mean that much to me. I'd find some shade and read very happily.

I live now in Arkansas and I'm older and less healthy and it's just as hot here in the summer although the season is shorter and the humidity not nearly as high. I still read outdoors when I can, which is less often now that I'm older, but I still enjoy it as much.

Reading outside is wonderful. I did it since I was a teen. I never got skin cancer and I spent a lot of my life in the sun. Life can be good if you let it be.

Barry

My wife lived in Houston until I kidnapped her and brought her to South Georgia. It is just as hot and humid here as in Houston. Her best friend recently retired and moved to Bella Vista Arkansas.
Apache

[ottdmk]

To answer the question posed in the topic title: God, I hope not. For me, e-ink is the perfect marriage of technology and reading. I can get just as lost in my Kobo as I could in a physical book (it's been a while since I've read a physical book.) Mind you, this can sometimes be a negative thing. With the light on my H2O I have sometimes ended up reading far too late than is good for me... (with an external light for a p-book my wife would make me turn it off. :-P )

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ottdmk

To answer the question posed in the topic title: God, I hope not. For me, e-ink is the perfect marriage of technology and reading. I can get just as lost in my Kobo as I could in a physical book (it's been a while since I've read a physical book.) Mind you, this can sometimes be a negative thing. With the light on my H2O I have sometimes ended up reading far too late than is good for me... (with an external light for a p-book my wife would make me turn it off. :-P )

I was one of those 'e-readers are cool, but I prefer paper books, because they don't require batteries' types. The first Nook that introduced front lighting tempted me to try an e-reader and I haven't gone back to a paper book since. To the point where if I want to reread a book that I already have in paper, I'll buy the eBook instead. Carrying my Kobo around is just easier.

[Katsunami]

The one thing I find irritating about e-readers is that they don't have a physical way of showing you the progress you've made by becoming thicker on the left and thinner on the right (or otherwise around should you read from right to left). That's the one thing I still like about paper books

(Some e-readers have progress bars, or page number-like progress, but in full screen mode, the KA1 shows nothing but a wall of text. In non-full screen mode where it can show progress, it wastes half the screen with whitespace and headers and footers...)

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

(Some e-readers have progress bars, or page number-like progress, but in full screen mode, the KA1 shows nothing but a wall of text. In non-full screen mode where it can show progress, it wastes half the screen with whitespace and headers and footers...)

The Sonys (which I've mostly been using lately) show "Page xxx of xxx" at the bottom. I like that. The older ones just show "xx of xxx" at the bottom (along with the battery gauge and font size indicator on the black status bar – I like the black bar, it separates it from the text).

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

The one thing I find irritating about e-readers is that they don't have a physical way of showing you the progress you've made by becoming thicker on the left and thinner on the right (or otherwise around should you read from right to left). That's the one thing I still like about paper books

(Some e-readers have progress bars, or page number-like progress, but in full screen mode, the KA1 shows nothing but a wall of text. In non-full screen mode where it can show progress, it wastes half the screen with whitespace and headers and footers...)

The progress bar that kindles used to have was great. You could very quickly see where you were in the book, where you were in the chapter, how big each chapter was, and how many chapters remained to be read. It really didn't take up any extra space either.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

The progress bar that kindles used to have was great. You could very quickly see where you were in the book, where you were in the chapter, how big each chapter was, and how many chapters remained to be read. It really didn't take up any extra space either.

Yep. I like those also. Usually when I read on a Kindle it's on the Keyboard or no-touch 4 (or "the Kindle keyboard without a keyboard" as I call it). It seems like they should make that view an option of the newer Kindles.

[sjfan]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

The one thing I find irritating about e-readers is that they don't have a physical way of showing you the progress you've made by becoming thicker on the left and thinner on the right (or otherwise around should you read from right to left). That's the one thing I still like about paper books

(Some e-readers have progress bars, or page number-like progress, but in full screen mode, the KA1 shows nothing but a wall of text. In non-full screen mode where it can show progress, it wastes half the screen with whitespace and headers and footers...)

My Kobo has a couple of options for this:
1. Turn on a single line at the bottom that says “Page 182 of 426”
2. Leave it in full-screen mode, but set the menu to the progress bar. The text is full-screen, but tapping the center of the screen pulls up the progress bar and tapping again dismisses it.

Some of the patches give you fine control over exactly how #1 is formatted and presented (e.g you can change it to just “182/426” if you want).

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

The progress bar that kindles used to have was great. You could very quickly see where you were in the book, where you were in the chapter, how big each chapter was, and how many chapters remained to be read. It really didn't take up any extra space either.

Kindles had that _in the past_ ?

They don't have that, at least since the Touch of 2011, which I've had. I bought a Kobo because it provides this information, although it requires calling up the menu. I don't like not knowing how far along I am in a book. (The KPW1 at least provides a and page numbers for the TOC, which the Kobo doesn't do; and the Kindle even honors the page numbers sent by calibre.)

@sjfan: I think (don't know on top of my head) that I have my KA1 set up the same as your option 2.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

The progress bar that kindles used to have was great. You could very quickly see where you were in the book, where you were in the chapter, how big each chapter was, and how many chapters remained to be read. It really didn't take up any extra space either.

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Kindles had that _in the past_ ?

They don't have that, at least since the Touch of 2011, which I've had. I bought a Kobo because it provides this information, although it requires calling up the menu. I don't like not knowing how far along I am in a book. (The KPW1 at least provides a and page numbers for the TOC, which the Kobo doesn't do; and the Kindle even honors the page numbers sent by calibre.)

The Kindle NT4 (as mentioned above by rcentros) has it, and it came out at the same time as the touch. I just looked, and it uses even less space than I remembered, about 10 pixels at the very bottom of the screen.

[barryem]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

The one thing I find irritating about e-readers is that they don't have a physical way of showing you the progress you've made by becoming thicker on the left and thinner on the right (or otherwise around should you read from right to left). That's the one thing I still like about paper books

I have to agree that the thickness of the remaining part of the book is a first rate progress indicator but a percentage read is as good an indicator and maybe better. Even if the thickness is more intuitive, would you really want your kindle to get thinner and the cover to get thicker as you read?

I read paperbacks all my life. Now I read on a Kindle and sometimes on my phone. Both are better in a lot of ways than the paperbacks. I'd miss them if I had to go back to paper.

Ereaders are the third great technical advance in reading. The first was the move to paper books from scrolls. The second was the printing press. And now there's the ereader.

Oh wait! I left out what might be the most important advance: the inserting of spaces to separate words. If I recall that happened about the 10 century.

Barry