Here in The Guardian is a notice of a survey conducted by Google on the uses people make of their tablet (a link to a PowerPoint of the survey appears a few lines in). It shows that the tablet is becoming a tool of choice for a variety of activities, and book reading falls low on the list.
When asked to relate tablet minutes to minutes on other media, 59 percent claimed they spent more of them on the tablet than reading a paper book. Plus, 43 percent of them rated tablet minutes above desktop/laptop minutes. A lower portion, 34 percent of them, elevated tablet minutes above TV minutes. (Television remains the most popular leisure activity in other surveys.)
The most common tablet activity is “Playing games,” at 84 percent of users. Reading e-books came in at 46 percent, behind social networking, entertainment (music, videos), reading the news, email, and information searches.
Sixty-eight percent of them log more than one hour a day, and 28 percent of them say the tablet is their primary computer. We should expect that latter figure to go up quickly in the coming years. It’s light and small. Why lug around a laptop?
The versatility of the tablet, too, spells the end of e-readers that only provide reading materials. Why pay for two devices when one will do everything the other will do?
What it means for book reading is obvious. For more and more people, books will not be discrete objects. They will be just another content delivered through the same screen as emails, department store Web pages, etc.
