E-Books Suffering from Tablets?

[Ankari]

I read an article on Forbes that discusses the impact of tablets on e-books. Odd, you would have thought that tablets would benefit e-books.

“Tablets will adversely affect the e-book business in that the tablet is a multifunction device and will therefore draw the reader into non-book activities and therefore cause them to consume books slower and therefore buy fewer books versus a single function e-reading device,” Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publishing services at Bowker Market Research, told me in May when it started to become clear just how tablet sales were affecting e-books.

You fan find the article here on Forbes.

 

[Steerpike]

An interesting hypothesis, but I'm not sure I agree. As noted, the increase in eBook sales has been astronomical. The reduced increase he talks about is still a 38% increase. That's huge, by normal market standards, right? Could it be the market is just normalizing? No matter what, the previous rate of growth couldn't simply continue indefinitely. The fact that so many more people now buy eBooks would, in and of itself, slow the "growth," I would think.

 

[CupofJoe]

I think that Reading has been confused with Buying...
Fewer books might be read linearly [especially as were are now supposed to add hypertext and rich-media features to every story] but I can see more books getting bought, just because it will be so easy to do so. if attention spans really do shorten perhaps shorter, part-works will be come the norm> A chapter or 2 at a time almost like it was in the 19th Century with Dickens and Conan-Doyle.
In fact that sounds like a good idea... 5-6 authors all offering up a chapter or two in a single e-pub for readers to sample...

 

[BWFoster78]

This seems to make little sense to me. There are already tons of things that I can do with my time besides reading. Adding another distraction seems like it would not make much difference. I read because I enjoy reading.

 

[yachtcaptcolby]

Yeah, that quote sounds to me like a classic case of over-thinking things. Tablets roll a lot of functionality into a single device, but none of that functionality is new--it's all stuff we've been able to do with other devices for several years. It's conceivable that a tablet that displays a warning or plays a sound whenever it receives a new email or whatever could be a distraction to readers, but I think most people would turn all that stuff off so they can just sit and read.

 

[BWFoster78]

I think you would have to also consider whether or not smartphones will increase reading. I now have a book with me 24/7. When I'm waiting for an oil change, I read a novel on my phone instead of reading a magazine.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

Strictly speaking it's true, but it makes it sound like the ebook market is particularly adversely affected by tablets. If tablets let you do other new things, they'd adversely affect everything else you might do. They'd adversely affect the ebook market just as much as the physical book market, or the TV market, or the movie market, etc.