Friday, November 13, 2015

E-Anecdote

An anecdote is not necessarily a datum, and all that. So this is just an observation I found interesting. I was doing a Q&A with a university creative writing class this week, and midway through the professor asked a question of his own: how many of the students read e-books on any media, from Kindles to iPads? Out of around twenty, only three raised their hands.

The New York Times recently reported that e-book sales have fallen in the first part of this year, suggesting that the survival of printed books isn't as precarious as once thought. Certainly, those students, all of them digital natives and presumably a target audience for purveyors of e-books, prefer the printed page. It wasn't the time and place to go into any detail as to why, but for authors who, like me, are putting some or all of their back list* out as self-published e-books, it is interesting. Who is the audience? One survey suggests that e-book consumption 'seems to be a habit acquired after the age of 24.' Are we missing out on a rising generation of readers, who think that e-books are no substitute for printed books, which don't need expensive devices to read them, and can be bought cheaply secondhand?


*See the blog's sidebar for links to short stories, short story collections, and two novels that fell out of print.
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