We’ve already decided we can’t live without the immediacy of the many other devices we’ve got (a.k.a. iEverything). On an e-reader, you can highlight a phrase, and then access that quote without cumbersome flipping, or even having to remember where it was. You can share your highlighted scrap of genius on Facebook and Twitter. But most conveniently, you can read a review of a new book on your desktop—then just hop over to Amazon, buy it, and send it wirelessly to your Kindle. No wonder Borders doesn’t exist anymore, and my local Barnes and Noble’s just got replaced by a gym.
But though bookstores may suffer, reading itself seems to be unaffected by the change in medium. If anything, greater convenience seems to have lead to an increase in readership. A 2013 USA TODAY/Bookish poll found that 41 percent of readers under 40 had read more since acquiring an e-reader, followed by 31 percent of those over 40. In addition to the ease of buying books, Kindle has a feature in which it recommends books you may like, even when you’ve only finished a “free sample.” This might account for the increase in average books read per year by e-reader owners, from 13 to 21, as per the poll. Still, E-readers don’t seem to herald the doom of the publishing industry, or even of libraries, which are increasingly offering e-book lending services.
The poll also asked its respondents their top reasons for reading. “To learn something” won at 72 percent, followed by “to be entertained” at 64 percent. Since the days of painstakingly calligraphic medieval manuscripts, “cheap and mass produced” (back then) Gutenberg bibles, to pulp fiction, detective novels and John Grisham’s courtroom dramas, even to Fifty Shades of Gray—those motives for reading remain the same. It is the medium, not demand, that has changed. If anything, this innovative technology may increase the numbers of those who get their hands on new books—even if those books are all on the same device.