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