The other night I was standing on a crowded commuter train. As we swayed along I gradually realized that, of the four people in front of me, three were reading books (two text, one manga) and one was busy with a mobile phone. So I looked around the whole carriage and it seemed that, although the persons in my immediate vicinity were an unrepresentative sample, perhaps a quarter of the crowd had their noses in books while the rest were focused on a cellphone. There were even a couple of newspapers.
It seems to me that within recent memory, practically everyone awake on a train would be scrolling, swiping, pecking or poking at a little glass screen. Is paper and ink making a comeback?
--Julian
I actually don't think books ever went away. Of course there were more book / magazine / newspaper readers back when there was basically no alternative, but even with alternatives text-based media still does well. Probably some of the people you see staring at screens are reading books. That is they are readers for whom, I would guess, like most of us, the text is the thing. The vehicle--print or pixels--is unimportant.
Posted by: Only a Blockhead | 10/26/2013 at 09:22 AM