The portability, it weighs only about a pound, and the ease with which I can get to my content is fabulous. I think that I have read more in the last few weeks than I have in awhile. That's with the generous lending policy at Barnes and Noble.
So with all the fun that I am having with my device I thought that I would do a little research on how tablets would affect the future of reading. The results were pretty interesting.
First, off at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 2010 was all but writing off the e-reader.
“E-readers are great news now, but there might not be e-readers by the end of next year,” said Gilbert Fiorentino, Chief Executive of the Technology Products Group of Systemax Inc., which owns electronics retailers CompUSA and TigerDirect.
I found this to be a little disingenuous considering that CompUSA closed all of their brick and mortar stores about five years ago because they couldn't compete. And Tiger Direct, well they are not on the top-tier of the online e-tailers. So, to predict the death of product when you can't get your own act together just sounds like sour grapes to me.
In September of 2011 Amazon had, according to PC Magazine, had already taken 95,000 pre-orders for the new Kindle Fire. That number exploded to 500,000 by late October.
The Nook Tablet also pre-sold well, although Barnes and Noble did not released the exact amount of pre-orders in a company press release.
The ironic part is that Gilbert Florentino cited the HP Touchpad as the reason the e-reader would die. Six months after it's release HP got out of the tablet market and Touchpads were selling for $99 down from their original $400+ asking price.
Second, I found that the e-reader/tablet was also changing the way people read, especially print magazines and news content.
According to James McQuivey 20% of people read a physical magazine less now that they have an tablet.
Other studies have found that readers are not willing to pay additional money for a news app on their tablets when their tablet's browser can provide the same information for free.
The main complaint that I hear all the time about reading on a tablet is that people love to physically hold a book, that they get much more enjoyment out of it. Accroding to Jonah Lerner in The Future of Reading they may be right.
In his article for Wired Magazine he states that there are primarily two routes in the brain for making sense of words. the Ventral route and the Dorsail stream.
The Ventral route makes it easy for us to recognize routine passages by relying on a part of the cortex known as the visual word form area (VWFA) making reading effortless and easy.
The Dorsail stream however, it activated when we have to work hard to understand a passage. This can happen when the writer's handwriting is bad or the pages are weathered. Any imperfection in the text will activate the Dorsail stream.
This what bothers Mr. Lerner about reading on a tablet. That with the perfect font sizes and clarity of text this part of our brain that is activated by reading will not get the workout it deserves while reading and the reader will that sense of satisfaction that comes from mastering a difficult piece of text.
I was one of those that held off and romanticized the reading of the book. While I still respect and love the physical book, I can now see that having a portable device to be able to read and obtain knowledge when you want and where you want is a good thing.
As technology advances the ability of anyone to have the world at their fingertips is becoming more and more of a reality. Just as the movable type brought about the Renaissance, I think the ultraportable tablet will bring about a new Renaissance in the future of reading.
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Use less No change Use more Don't use/not applicableJames McQuivey, Ph.d
James McQuivey, Ph.
