New Poll Finds Majority of Americans Read Ebooks

[yourlibrarian]

Thought others here might find this new article to be of interest.

"Some 54% of Americans currently read ebooks, according to the new poll, conducted in March 2014 among 2,234 U.S. adults. This result conflicts with a recent study from Pew, which found in January 2014 that 28% of Americans read an ebook in the last year.

The Harris Poll also found that those who read ebooks more read more books on average than other Americans. About a third of those who read ebooks exclusively or more than print read more than 20 books a year, while about a fifth of those who read more in print read more than 20 books a year.

Ebook readers also purchase more books, about double what other readers buy."

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Wow, that's fascinating and counter-intuitive.

I used to be a big print book buyer, but ebooks makes book buying so easy, so frictionless in the 21st century marketing jargon, that I only buy print books which celebrate their printed nature. That is to say graphic novels, comics, photography. Since these books tend to be slightly more costly per page retail than running text, perhaps my total spending hasn't changed?

[yourlibrarian]

And so portable too. It's a rare reader that would weigh more than a book and you can have a huge collection at your disposal.

I found the gender stats of particular interest.

[yhlee]

My deadtree book spending has gone down, but this isn't really useful anecdata since the amount of reading I do in total has gone down a lot. The deadtree book spending is really a reflection of that. I'm not doing a huge amount of ebook reading either (and what I do is largely fanfic off AO3, or else short sf/f epubized to be more portable). Still, I wouldn't have expected this result!

[yourlibrarian]

As someone pointed out below, the stat is very likely misreported. However, I also question what is meant by "book" because while most of the fic I read is short enough not to qualify, some of them are book length. What's more Kobo tracks each file as a "book" and if that's the case I read around a dozen books a week. If people are reporting files as books as they may when using mobile devices to read, then it wouldn't surprise me at all if the reading statistic is far higher than has been counted in the past.

[muccamukk]

I wonder if part of the buying more books thing is that it's so difficult to lend or swap e-books.

If I'm all legal and proper, I have to buy a copy for me, and then if I want my friend to read it, I have to buy her a copy as well. If it were a paper book, I'd have just lent her the ruddy thing.

That said, I buy about the same number of books as I always have, but mostly buy them in e-book these days, as it takes less space.

[sanacrow]

I definitely buy more books since I went to mostly ebooks. Reading paper had gotten so difficult that I was reading a small fraction of my "normal" amount. Ebooks don't hurt to read - the reader is lighter than a small paperback, I can tap instead of turning pages, and I can make the text as big as I want. (And I can't believe so many people read so few books. I'd die if I could only read 20 books in a year! A month.... maybe.)

[malnpudl]

I'm with you. I love my e-reader more than words can say because I can see everything clearly and because reading is pain-free. It's rare when both of these things are true with a paperback, much less a hardbound book.

[yourlibrarian]

I suspect the adaptable font and ease of reading makes a huge difference for an aging population. I know that a friend's mother said she'd practically stopped reading over the past 5 years because it was so difficult for her.

[doeeyedbecky]

Amazon allows you to lend 'paid' books to whoever you'd like for a period of up to 2 weeks.

My roommate lent me a book she had 'bought'/gotten for free from Amazon when the pfice had returned to $2.99.

[finch]

Most of my paper book buying is secondhand, so certainly my book buying is a lot more /trackable/ now. I also am much more likely to just go ahead and buy something that looks interesting on Kindle or Comixology or Smashwords or this or that bundle or... yeah. I am given many more opportunities on any given day to buy ebooks, basically.

[yourlibrarian]

That's an interesting point. I haven't bought paper books in a while but when I did, I also bought them entirely secondhand (or borrowed from libraries). Even buying them online is more trackable than when I used the local used bookstore.

[madfilkentist]

Something weird is going on when two poll results differ that radically. Perhaps they were actually asking different questions? It's typical for polls to be reported very sloppily.

I'm not convinced that 54% of Americans read books. 54% reading e-books is really implausible.

[yourlibrarian]

Yes, as someone pointed out in comments there, chances are the reporting should have said that "54% of those who read books, are also reading eBooks"

[doeeyedbecky]

I find that number to be awfully low myself, expecially with the amount of number of free books available on Amazon alone. Add in ARc/Omnilit, Smashwords and ARCs available from Netgalley or the authors directly and the numbers jump drastically.

I've read 55 books this year alone, and that's reading 1-2 hours a night.

[yourlibrarian]

I'm pretty sure there's a lot of reading getting done -- just not traditional books purchased from a bookseller ::nods::