Kindle, reading, research, opinion

"Amazon sold more Kindle books than physical books this Christmas - SlipperyBrick.com"

Hmmm.

"The Kindle was a bad idea, Jobs told the New York Times after yesterday's Macworld keynote. "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."

I suppose it’s not shocking that someone with a vested interest in portable devices and snack-sized consumption would think so.

A little research on this subject produces interesting results. There’s clearly no consensus that “reading is dead”.  The data/facts can go either way. Further, even if only 40 percent of the population read a book, that means that somewhere around a 140 million people dedicate around 10 hours (my calculation based upon average reading speeds and book lengths) to following a single subject through to it’s conclusion. In my less generous moments – sitting in traffic for instance – I would be hard pressed to believe that many had that much focus.

Then again, there’s this:

“The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn’t read any, the usual number read was seven.”

Hmmm,  seven books means 70-hours of focused attention. I didn’t watch that many movies in all of 2009. That may even be true if you throw in TV movies.

Then again, there’s reading, and then there’s desire to read. Kindle’s may sell because we feel we should read more. We just know it’s a “good” thing (bit like taking vitamins), but there’s always an excuse handy that gets it the way. If that’s true, and the Kindle promises us a solution, I suspect that would be more valuable to Amazon than growth in actual book reading. The Kindle is in an interesting place: more convenient than books (if you can get past the buy-in price), and quickly becoming a status symbol in its own right. I can say that I haven’t read more books because of my Kindle purchase, but I have bought more books because of it.

Opinions: portable electronic book reading devices will largely replace physical books in 10-years; the Kindle will disappear in 3-5 years, but not before establishing a standard reading format allowing Amazon to ship books to any number of reading devices; lots more books will be purchased, but a smaller percentage will be read end to end.

Comments

[Jasper Kamperman]

Very insightful.

I don't think the Kindle/iPad can solve the "appetite larger than stomach" problem. I do see it reducing the house-move agony of packing and unpacking all those "to be read later" books, and schlepping the accompanying book cases.