
American readers still prefer printed books over eBooks - Tomte
http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12775836/us-printed-book-reading-rate-steady-pew-study
======
jasode
It's interesting to note that The Verge uses the word _" prefer"_ in the title
of their article but the underlying Pew Research report[1] does not have that
word anywhere.

What Pew did was telephone some people asking them how often they read and
also whether the format was ebook or paper. It seems logical to infer a
"preference" from the answers to those questions. However, it's not that
simple because a major reason people read "paper" is the _higher cost_ of
ebooks (which also includes the significant cost of a Kindle device.)

In other words, the _economics_ of paper vs ebooks may be skewing _why_ more
people read hardcopy books instead of electronic ones. (E.g. If you telephone
people asking them what car they drive, _more_ will respond with Kia and
Cheverolet but that does not mean people _prefer_ them over Lexus and BMW.)

To extract a pure preference, it seems like you'd have to devise a marketing
experiment which disguises the costs like this:

Choice A: $450 for 50 New York Times best sellers in paperback format.

Choice B: $450 for a Kindle preloaded with the same 50 ebooks.

Then you observe which package actually sells the most. We'd then see if more
people value the paperback with the ability to resell, the tactile sensation,
the simplicity of no batteries more than the e-reader with the minimal space &
weight, the font size adjustability, the searchability, the ability to load
more ebooks after the 50 preloaded ones, etc.

The above experiment may also have different outcomes depending on genre
(fiction/novels, non-fiction/college textbooks) and age group (20-something,
over-50, etc).

[1]Pew Research pdf downloadable here:
[http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/01/book-
reading-2016/#the...](http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/01/book-
reading-2016/#the-share-of-americans-who-have-read-a-book-in-the-last-year-is-
largely-unchanged-since-2012-more-americans-read-print-books-than-either-read-
e-books-or-listen-to-audio-books)

~~~
WalterBright
I recently acquired a stack of 50 textbooks. Getting them to my car was a
sweaty problem :-)

(I was parked about a half mile away.)

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qrendel
My personal experience, from having been an e-book aficionado who eventually
went back to almost entirely paper (cheap used hardcover when I can find it):

Ebook advantages:

\- Cheap, no commitment, try before you buy

\- Easy to transport, take 30+ books on vacation with no increase in weight

Dead-tree advantages:

\- Higher retention of material (various cues for memory related to the
physicality and layout of the book versus an indistinguisable smorgasbord of
ebook pages)

\- Greater tendency to actually read, since they sit around your house/living
room taunting you, rather than being forgotten in some obscure folder of your
device

~~~
mstolpm
Off topic: I understand your arguments, but every time I read something like
"mostly cheap used hardcover", as an author myself I have to ask: You are
aware that the creative behind the work you read does not get a dime from you?

~~~
Turing_Machine
Do you also think that Ford and GM should get more money when someone sells a
used car, or that builders should get more money every time a house gets sold?

~~~
veddox
The difference is that with a house and a car, you pay for the physical
object. With a book, you pay for the ideas contained therein - a subtle but
(IMO) important difference.

Which isn't to say used-book sales should be illegal, but that if you can
afford it, why not support the person behind the ideas you're profiting from?

~~~
Turing_Machine
"With a book, you pay for the ideas contained therein - a subtle but (IMO)
important difference."

Not according to the law, you aren't.

Also, there are plenty of ideas involved in building cars and houses. They're
not just random piles of wood, metal, and plastic, any more than a book is
just ink smeared on paper.

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TheAceOfHearts
This probably isn't surprising to most people.

Ebooks are great when you need to occasionally reference random parts or if
you're performing a search for specific content.

But with physical books... It just feels better. I don't even know how to
describe it. I think I just perform the action with different expectations.

On top of that, and this is probably a silly point, I love the sense of
ownership you get when you hold the real book. It's hard for me to feel a
strong sense of ownership over a PDF.

I don't know if this is a common sentiment or not, but I believe that upon
purchasing a physical book you should be entitled to a digital copy as well.

I wonder how audiobooks stack up. I know that a couple friends of mine love
listening to audiobooks, and I listen to around ~100 hours per month.
Audiobooks are great when you have to commute, when you don't have anyone to
share your meal with, or just when you're out for a run.

Something I've noticed is that I find it hard to consume certain kinds of
books using specific mediums, depending on the scenario. For example, I would
never be able to pick up a technical or serious topic with an audiobook, I
basically only listen to scifi and fantasy. With technical books, if it's a
topic where I'll be interacting heavily with the computer (e.g. by writing and
trying lots of examples), it ends up feeling better to use a digital book. I
think physical books are the best for when I'm reading about a topic that
requires me to just sit and think about the specific topic.

Although, interestingly enough, my main method of consumption of random
research papers is digital. I wonder if my retention and understanding would
improve if I printed em out instead of reading off my laptop.

Luckily, I think all mediums can co-exists. I think they fill different
niches.

------
veddox
Glad to hear it, even though I am not really surprised.

eBooks have several well-known advantages, but for all their worth and
utility, there are some areas in which they just cannot match real books.

To name but one: multi-sensory input. Humans are designed to experience the
world around them with as many senses as possible. Physical books can
stimulate up to four of our five senses. Sight (obviously), hearing (the
rustling of pages), touch (the feel of paper, the relative thickness of the
part of the book you've already read vs. what is still unread) and (especially
on older books) smell.

eBooks only really offer sight, and, to a very limited extent, touch. That
this paucity of sensuous input does not satisfy us as much as a physical book
should not come as a surprise.

~~~
mbrock
Aside from sensory immersion etc, paper books are just easier to flip through,
have higher resolution, and generally look nicer.

And there's the simple fact that sitting somewhere with a book makes you look
pretty cool whereas sitting there with a Kindle makes you look like a dork.

Also, paper books can be shared, lent, given, and they exist as nice physical
objects instead of as these weird ephemeral files that Amazon can probably
delete at any time.

~~~
zappo2938
When I walk into a person's house and see a book shelf I look to see what
titles are there. Or, I look to see who and what people are reading in a
coffee shop. The reason is that I like to know what people are thinking. I
don't get that from a Kindle.

~~~
toyg
That's true, ereaders don't broadcast your "intellectual worth" and interests
as much as bookshelves do. It's also not a conversation starter ("a biography
of John Major, really?").

I wonder if it's something that could be solved with some sort of integration
with those "smart frames" that show your family pictures.

This said, I don't agree with ereaders making people "look like dorks" \--
pretty much everyone in a coffee shop these days is glued to a screen; be it a
laptop, phone, tablet or reader, the look is exactly the same (well, unless
you're rocking some huge "portable 386" from 1995, in which case you look
either nuts or "oh so retro").

------
jrockway
It is nice to be able to buy used books. The problem with e-books is that they
were designed to cut out those historical rights to lend and resell. Turns
out: people don't like them as much that way. Oops.

------
cpach
Personally I think the UI and UX of a paperback is really hard to beat.

~~~
Hoasi
True. And this is sound technology too. Proven over centuries...

~~~
cpach
I fully agree. Rather cheap as well.

~~~
Hoasi
> The book is like the spoon: once invented, it cannot be bettered. —Umberto
> Eco, from _This is Not the End of the Book: A conversation_ (2011)

------
Booktrope
While this indicates that there are lots of people who never read ebooks, it
does not actually say whether more ebooks or print books are being sold and
read. The Pew survey notes that the mean number of books read is 12, while the
median is 4. This means that one-half of all readers surveyed read no more
than 4 books a year, so the other half of all readers must average over 16
books a year. It's probably even more skewed than that, although numbers are
hard to come by. This skewing of the book market probably accounts for the
fact that ebooks are far greater than 28% of book sales, although accurate
figures are hard to come by for several reasons (sales reports from industry
groups don't include self-published authors, the fastest growing part of the
business, for example). However, it looks like people who read fewer books are
probably much less likely to switch to ebooks, possibly because the change
costs time or money, possibly because people who read fewer books are probably
on the whole less technologically adept than people who read more. Also, print
books are still assigned from an early age in most schools, with ebooks being
a secondary alternative in education, meaning that people still start with
print books and that nearly everyone reads some print books unless they are
very uneducated.

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chestnut-tree
No real surprise. E-ink readers are still only available with black and white
displays. Their screens are mostly shaped to fit a small paperback.

Physical books, in contrast, come in an infinite variety of shapes and sizes.
Yes, tablets come in larger sizes and with high resolution colour screens, but
they still aren't as comfortable to read as paper or even e-ink displays.

~~~
toyg
E-ink readers are a luxury, unfortunately. Where phone and tablets can be
justified in most homes as being multipurpose, ereaders are fundamentally
single-purpose. This is why their share of the market grows so slowly - it's
limited to hardcore readers and the wealthy. We need eink to go beyond
dedicated devices.

~~~
douche
I guess so, but when the basic Kindle costs about the same as a full tank of
gas, or just a little more than a newly released AAA video game, it's hard to
say that it is really restricted to the wealthy.

The biggest appeal of the Kindle is that you can read it outside in the glare
of the sun, and the battery lasts for months. I would agree, that for most
people, the smartphone they have in their pocket already is good enough for
reading ebooks.

~~~
veddox
> it's hard to say that it is really restricted to the wealthy.

Good point - eReaders aren't really all that expensive (I got my first one for
60€). What might be more important when considering the distribution of
eReaders is the correlation wealthy <-> educated <-> reads a lot.

> for most people, the smartphone they have in their pocket already is good
> enough for reading ebooks

I can't imagine reading a full book on the tiny screen of a smartphone. Do
people really do that? (As in, for serious reading.) And if so, how much?

~~~
douche
I can't imagine reading anything technical or even most non-fiction on a
phone, but for plain old entertainment-grade fiction it's doable. I read most
of the Aubrey-Maturin series and The Expanse series on my phone last year.

------
bad_user
I still buy printed books because I refuse to pay for DRM enabled ebooks and I
can't find a good source of DRM free books, other than project Gutemberg.

A printed book you can lend to others and will outlast any digital device or
DRN platform.

~~~
bcook
No Starch Press offers DRM-free ebooks.

~~~
bad_user
Publishers of technical books usually publish DRM-free ebooks, like O'Reilly
and Manning. And so for technical books I prefer them in eBook format, though
for such books many people prefer them in print for other reasons.

I was complaining about fiction.

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fern12
I will always prefer physical books. Way back in the 80s when I was in grade
school, books were my only form of entertainment that didn't require me to
leave my bedroom (extreme introvert speaking here). Plus, there's the
irresistible smell of the ink, glue, and bleached paper.

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soufron
Yeah people have the right to ne stupid.

