From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 8 May 2014 23:26:04 -0500

I don't do this with quite the thoroughness that Jim does, but I too
like to see what people are reading, and on what devices, when i
travel in airplanes. I have been pleasantly surprised at how many
people who are reading are doing so from print books on my recent
trips. People using laptops are almost all doing something other than
reading books, and I have not seen a lot of dedicated e-reader
devices. I'd estimate that well over 50% of the people on my plane
flights out of Dallas to cities on the East coast and returning to
Dallas who are reading books are doing it with print books rather than
ebooks. Maybe we're just not as technologically advanced out here in
the Southwest?

Sandy Thatcher

P.S. I carry an iPad with me, but almost never use it to read books,
preferring print books myself.



> From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 7 May 2014 21:15:51 -0400
>
> Persistent liblicense readers will recall that several times in
> 2010-2012, I strolled through an Acela train on Sunday afternoon doing
> a census of the reading public:  e- vs. p-, device vs. codex.  The
> last time I see I did this (from the all-knowing Liblicense archives)
> is just over two years ago, 4/29/12.  The upshot of those counts was
> that print was holding its own but slipping:  counts in 2010 and 2011
> found ratios of 4 and 6 to 1 in favor of print reading; by 2012, it
> was down to 2/1.
>
> Now, I well know that this is an amateur snapshot with all sorts of
> things wrong with it, but just enough plausibility to keep me curious.
>  Travel habits change, so I've not had the chance to do this lately,
> and tonight's data come from a weeknight train, 7 p.m. out of New York
> for Philadelphia, which would arguably get a few more people trying to
> get work done for the day than is the case on Sunday, when the most
> assiduous people are the ones evidently going to DC for NIH and NSF
> panels and reading their folders carefully.  So this means as little
> as you would like it to mean.
>
> But it looks like the war is over.  The last time I reported, I
> acknowledged that the smart phone was making it hard to tell who was
> reading and who wasn't; this time I just had to give up and count
> smart phones, because so many people were indeed giving them the
> steady attention you give to continuing video or running print.  Lots
> of laptops, lots of full-size tablets, a modest number of dedicated
> readers (Kindle, Nook).  These counts are an amateur's approximation,
> but in four business class cars we got about 120 device-readers and
> about 20 print-readers.  And only halfway through the train, counting
> print generously, did I wish I was counting *books* -- you know,
> pages, binding, title, prose, the whole nine yards -- but when I
> finished, my estimate was that no more than half the print readers
> were holding a codex book.  Magazines, newspapers, paperwork accounted
> for the rest.
>
> I'll append only that I was in a large research library unfamiliar to
> me last week and spent a few minutes in the stacks, coming upon an
> open table area where students were furiously studying for final
> exams.  They sat within yards, nay feet, of the stacks of a first-rate
> library, little suspecting indeed that they were only a matter of a
> few yards from BOOKS I HAD WRITTEN MYSELF, but in the presence of such
> riches, every single one of the 20-25 students was devoted to a laptop
> or tablet, not a readable piece of paper in sight.  (Students are said
> to be passing on tablets, to divide their time between smart phone
> [their life] and laptop [their work], but these still had some
> holdouts.  Juniors and seniors, probably.)
>
> Jim O'Donnell