From a friend who recently purchased the iPad 2 (no previous iOS devices):
When I considered purchasing the iPad, I was reading too little. Almost nothing in paper form (with good reason too). And nothing online, cos at work it would be a distraction and when I came back home I would pay to not have to look at my laptop. I was feeling a steady intellectual decay overcoming me. With that background, I thought, even if the iPad can’t do anything else, but enable me to read more, it will be money well spent. And it is.
He’s not the only one. So many more among my friends have begun reading and sharing great stuff recently. In each case, three things have come together well:
The first is services like Twitter, (and Facebook) which have improved discovery tremendously. Unlike in the era of search, you don’t find good stuff as much as the good stuff/people find you. More people can be human filters now with Twitter and Facebook than with, say Google Reader [1].
The second is services like Flipboard, Pulse and Instapaper, which (in different ways) improve readability. You could include Mobile Safari as well, with its simple tap-to-zoom-to-column-view function that cuts out cruft & distractions. That would also include the Kindle iPhone and iPad apps.
The third, final and most important is devices like iPhone and iPad (and the Kindle, to some limited degree) which have revolutionized mobility. Twitter and Flipboard would never have gotten traction as PC services, even on laptops [2]. With these devices, you are in control of when, where and how you read – just like with a real book or magazine.
Put them all together, and you have a reading experience no newsstand or library can even come close to matching.
[1] Of course, an important part of discovery is also easy shareability.
[2] Specifically, iPhone and iPad are important because they have, through their design and the App Store, enabled developers to create mobile experiences for Pulse and Flipboard. As the original digital reader, this should probably count as a missed opportunity for the Kindle.
3 replies on “Why more people are reading more lately”
I worry that what happened to content creation will happen to “discover-share”. People slowly realised that while creating content (blogs, wikipedia entries) was satisfying to your creativity and sense of philanthropy, copying and pasting was simply easier. I see very little new content created now compared to earlier.
Similarly, people are likely to move to just reading what is shared, with no effort to discover anything that has not come to your through Twitter or FB.
I think I disagree with that point about content creation now v/s earlier. In an absolute sense there are more people writing more good stuff about more things than there were before: independent publications, newspapers, bloggers, more. News & opinion on the web is arguably more credible than that on any other medium.
As a percentage of the total Web population, content creators are declining – that’s more a sign that the web’s growing, and more a positive development than anything else.Finally, about reading what’s shared – the corollary is that more people are also sharing what they read! I’d say the serendipity of great stuff via TW/FB is arguable better than the predictability of Google Reader.
Also, what’s got me reading more is my HTC, the epub format and a longer commute! :)