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