21% Of Americans Have Read An E-Book In The Past Year

Sites include pewresearch.org . Published on June 17th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

It took a while for digital reading to catch on but now that most Americans have discovered the e-Book there seems to be no end in sight to number of readers and publishers who are now happy to jump on the bandwagon.

A new study has found that the tech savvy among us who own e-book readers and tablets are more likely to buy and read books (of any kind) than those without these devices. On the surface that might seem like nothing much in terms of discovery, but that is until you delve into the numbers.

The study which was conducted by Pew Research found that people who don’t own tablets and e-readers buy and consume round about 10 books a year. The people that own these devices buy and consume over 24 books a year. The difference as you can see is startling—more than double the rate of consumption.

The impact of the sales of Kindle Fires and iPads has been great among the reading public in America and a whopping 21% them claim to have read an e-book in the past year. The biggest reason people read digital books (or otherwise) is to learn new stuff. A whopping 26% of those interviewed cited this as their main reason for reading. Trailing that group was the people who read to escape reality—a sizable 15%.

All in all it is clear that e-readers and e-books are the future. The digitization of modern life is in the middle of the journey, and all we can do now is sit back and see where it takes us.