ELECTRONIC BOOKS AND PRINTED BOOKS
By James Surowiecki
1 As a recent report from the Codex Group showed,looking around bookstores is still a far more common way of finding new books than either online search orsocial media. In fact, independent bookstores are nowthriving, thanks in large part to their close ties to both publishers and customers. “Stores that can help you not just find what you’re looking for but also help you discover books you haven’t heard of are still very valuable to readers,” says Daniel Raff, a management professor at Wharton.
2 Of course, a lot of people believe that physical books are “technologically obsolete,” and that the book industry is heading down the path that the music industry took, where digital downloads decimated CD sales and put record stores out of business. It’s truethat, between 2009 and 2011, ebook sales rose attriple-digit annual rates. But last year, according toindustry trade groups, e-book sales rose just forty-fourper cent. (They currently account for about a fifth ofthe total market.) This kind of deceleration in thegrowth rate isn’t what you’d expect if e-books weregoing to replace printed books anytime soon. In arecent survey by the Codex Group, ninety-seven percent of people who read e-books said that they werestill loyal to print, and only three per cent of frequentbook buyers read only digital.
3 E-books obviously have certain advantages (likethe fact that you can carry lots of them around withyou), but for many book buyers their main appeal isthat they’re cheaper. Against that, the Codex Groupfinds that people of all ages still prefer print for seriousreading; e-book sales are dominated by genre fiction—“light reading.” This may be just a prejudice that willvanish as e-books become more common. But we doread things differently when they’re on a page ratherthan on a screen. A study this year found that people reading on a screen tended to skip around more andread less intensively, and plenty of research confirmsthat people tend to comprehend less of what they readon a screen. The differences are small, but they mayexplain the persistent appeal of paper. Indeed,hardcover book sales rose last year by a hundredmillion dollars.
4 For many people, as a number of studies show,reading is a genuinely tactile experience—how a bookfeels and looks has a material impact on how we feelabout reading. This isn’t necessarily traditionalism or nostalgia. The truth is that the book is an exceptionall good piece of technology— easy to read, portable,durable, and inexpensive. Unlike the phase-change move toward digital that we saw in music, the transition to e-books is going to be slow; coexistenceis more likely than conquest. The book isn’t obsolete.
Adapted from The New Yorker, July 29, 2013
According to the information in the article, the Codex Group’s research data supports all of the following except
a) at the moment, the Internet is not the most popular alternative for people interested in searching for something new to read.
b) if given a choice between buying a book in the electronic version or in the printed version, people still inevitably prefer the printed version.
c) the vast majority of people who read e-books are still attracted to printed books.
d) among the people who often purchase books, only a relatively small proportion limit themselves exclusively to e-books.
e) instead of representing a broad spectrum of literature and published material, e-book sales are still dominated by certain kinds of books.
