On my nightstand at home I have a yard-thick Autobiography of Mark Twain, a light-reading young adult novel, a bound collection of mystery yarns and a car magazine. Now, why am I giving you this useless info that you never requested? Well, it’s to testify to the fact that I like to read. And I like to read real, live, sit-on-your-table-and-take-up-space books.
Of course, for a while now, we’ve all been hearing that print books are a dying breed. That just like music and movies before them, everything will soon be totally digital and books will move away from the dusty old printed page. And studies and surveys, like this one by the Pew Research Center, have seemed to support that idea.
The folks who wrote the Dec. 27 report (titled, “E-book Reading Jumps; Print Book Reading Declines”) found that the number of e-book readers in the past 12 months (ages 16 and up) increased from 16% of all Americans to 23%. And at the same time, it appeared that print readers declined from 72% of the population to 67%.
If you dig a little deeper in the report, though, you find a little tidbit of news that seems to fly in the face of the throw-out-the-books mentality. Researchers asked the book readers what format they were reading, and 89% said they read at least one printed book in the last year. Only 30% said they had read even a single e-book.
Now, that might sound like survey minutia, but it feels like evidence to me that those good solid things with pages still have some appeal for a whole lot of people. And The Wall Street Journal agrees. Their article “Don’t Burn Your Books—Print Is Here to Stay” points out that, according to the Association of American Publishers, annual growth rate for e-book sales fell during 2012 to about 35%. The article also talked about the decline in e-reader sales. And, according to a Bowker Market Research survey, only 16% of American have ever actually purchased an e-book, while 59% say they have “no interest” in buying one.
That WSJ article even kind of suggested that the e-book crowd may actually be the types who would rather carry around a tablet or reader as a kind of brown paper bag substitute. That way you can’t lean over at the airport and discover that they’re reading the latest, ahem, Fifty Shades of Grey.
Maybe that’s a stretch. And I’m certainly not suggesting that e-books are going to disappear. But I’m suddenly feeling better about that tightly bound wonder, that weigher-down of backpacks, that shelf-stacking dust collector, my old chum the printed book. Long may she reign.
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