From Nathan Bransford:
Well well well.
For the first time since the heady days of early 2010s e-book enthusiasm, we’ve seen a pretty significant jump in people who think they’ll buy mostly e-books, with a clear plurality.
While the number of people who are sticking to paper books has stayed mostly the same, there was a big shift in people who welcome their coming e-book overlords, mainly due to fence-sitters hopping off into the e-book column.
Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford
I prefer e-books for several reasons:
– easier to read in bed at night – I can enlarge the print, and forego the glasses
– more books available in one tiny package
– lighter weight – as I have joint issues in my hands/wrists, this is a major reason
– easier to carry around on trips
A bit late to ask me that.
I’ve been buying ebooks all century, before Kindle, and I stopped buying print 10 years ago.
No regrets.
Besides, I ran out of space for them.
And the older ones are degrading out of usability.
You can tear my dead-tree books from my cold, dead fingers.
Or, more likely, make me put them in storage because I don’t have enough floor space, appropriately sturdy bookshelves,* or safe floor-loading capacity. (That’s the real reason that one cannot just repurpose older buildings as branch libraries — the floor-loading requirements for bookshelves are well beyond ordinary building-code specifications.)
* The reason I started doing cabinetry four decades ago is that the shelves of storebought bookcases warp in a year. Admittedly, that’s under the stress of casebound reference books, but between those and the art books that’s what we had…
My wife and I are almost entirely ebookers, but our children and parents are paper dead-enders, even though the children all but wear screens strapped to their heads. Go figure.
Anecdotally, the kids generally prefer paper. My fourteen-year-old certainly does. Yes, this is counter-intuitive. The question is whether they will age into ebooks or if this is a persistent generational difference. Anyone who claims to know should be pointed and laughed at.
Actually, kids overwhelmingly prefer things *other* than books.
Me, I’ll believe tbose cooked up “print vs digital” reports when they explicitly take out textbooks and focus on what the kids spend *their* money on. (Hint: it ain’t books.)
Try these statistics:
https://comparecamp.com/minecraft-statistics/
And factor in the separate Minecraft Education edition:
“Minecraft: Education Edition is an educational version of the base game, designed specifically for use in educational establishments such as schools, and built off of the Bedrock codebase. It is available on Windows 10, MacOS, iPadOS and Chrome OS.
It includes a Chemistry Resource Pack, free lesson plans on the Minecraft: Education Edition website, and two free companion applications: Code Connection and Classroom Mode.”
An initial beta test was carried out between 9 June and 1 November 2016.[169] The full game was then released on Windows 10 and MacOS on 1 November 2016.[170] On 20 August 2018, Mojang Studios announced that it would bring Education Edition to iPadOS in Autumn 2018. It was released to the App Store on 6 September 2018.[171] On 27 March 2019, it was announced that the Education Edition would be operated by JD.com in China.[172] On 26 June 2020, an Education Edition Public Beta was made available to Google Play Store compatible Chromebooks. The full game was released to the Google Play Store for Chromebooks on 7 August 2020. ”
To a certain extent, arguing pbook vs ebook is arguing who makes the most popular sleighs in a world of commercially available flying motorcycles. The book world is a nice lake but a much bigger ocean is increasingly popular with “swimmers”.
In fact, the best written story to come out in decades hit Netflix just a few weeks ago. It wasn’t litfic. In fact, it never was a book. The creators went straight to video and put every modern audio visual tool out there in service of their narrative vision.
Books are great but the new generation has other options.
The threat isn’t kids going to ebooks but rather ldaving books behind altogether.
Homer had his day.
Books are still relevant but times change…
You are changing the discussion. Recreational reading has never been a majority activity. I write this as a bookish kid in the ’70s. My always having a book with me was far, far from the mainstream. This is, however, a deflection from the discussion at hand, which is about whether those kids who voluntarily read books prefer paper or ebook.
No,I’m not.
It has never been popular but it is steadily becoming *less* popular.
The US trade book market has been flat all century while the population has grown by 8%. (Cummulative inflation has been over 11%.) The fraction that does read is declining. So a good portion of the added, younger population is choosing “neither”.
That doesn’t matter?
While other creative businesses are actively looking to put their product before as many pdople as possible in as many ways as possible, trade books are more concerned with*how* people read than the fact they read at all. Or not.
Rather than pondering if kids might or not “ageinto digital” might it not be more productive to ponder if they’ll age into reading? And more importantly *how* to turn nonreaders into readers?
Perhaps you are both missing some considerations here…
WHAT are kids reading? I don’t think it is a good assumption that they are reading the same things as adults.
What are they reading ON? Do they have the same devices as the adults – or are they mostly using their phones? Vastly inferior experience on an iPhone compared to a paper book.
WHEN are they reading? Are they reading in the bit of time that is available after the grind of daily living, or virtually whenever they want? (As PG has frequently noted, the Kindle hitting your nose as you doze off is quite a bit less traumatic than a 700 page hard back.)
As a (maybe) minor consideration – does the typical younger person have the experience of dusting multiple bookshelves holding decades worth of paper acquisitions? Have they packed, moved, and unpacked a metric ton or more of books several times during their lives? I am not planning to move again, until it comes time to put me in the ground – but I am still slowly reducing my paper footprint with the goal of eliminating everything except the few collectible editions that I possess.
All fair.
Feeding into my point that personal preferences are just preferences, which is fine, but pinning hopes on kids is worthless. That’s just projecting. Kids grow up and become their own persons with their own concerns. And the odds that non-readers become readers are way lower than kid readers becoming nonreaders. Whistling by the graveyard.
And again, arguing print vs digital is a waste of effort; a reader is a reader regardless on how and where they read. Its a debate that only addresses the short term concern of the pbook distributors unwilling to adapt to the world outside, who want consumers to follow their needs instead of their own needs. Not going to happen.
All that effort should be directed at getting more readers to replace those that “retire”. The best time to deal with a predictable crisis is before it arrives. And the trends are clear: the fraction of the populace getting at least some of their entertainment via books of any kind is declining.
We’re at the point where a trade paperback or BPH ebook runs $13. That same $13 buys a month of Netflix, 6 weeks of PRIME, two months of Hulu, Peacock, 4 months of Magellan. Or the first 4 months of GAMEPASS. Indie books and KU help but there is far more variety in the video and gaming services than in books, tradpub or indie. Look at it in eyeball-hours; a book offers what, 10-12 hours? The same $13 easily offers 150 hours of entertainment and escape from the dreary world outside via Netflix. Far more with most of the others.
The barbarians *are* at the gates but it’s not ebook readers publishers need to worry about; its the nonreaders, for they are legion. And growing.
But hey, to each their own. It’s still a darwinian world out their. The fittest will survive.
Perhaps they choose the medium before they choose the message. Suspension of disbelief in a paper book, ebook, or video screen? Where’s McLuhan when we need him?
I corrupted mine early. They prefer books. And all other forms of reading materials. It didn’t hurt growing up in a house with 3,000+ books, parents sharing three degrees in literature, and trips to the library at least twice a week…
Made me look. I wondered what was the source of the data. Clicking through, Bransford describes it as “our annual unscientific poll.” This probably means he put up an internet poll somewhere, which some portion of his readers responded to. I have no problem with this. It is just a straw poll from an unrepresentative sample, and Bransford seems to know this means it is mildly interesting but not significant in any general sense.
Repeating it, taking it at face value with no discussion of the source, is another matter. That is flagrantly unserious.