62% of 16 To 24-Year-Olds Prefer Printed Books Over eBooks 331
assertation writes "According to The Guardian, 62% of readers between the age of 16 and 24 prefer physical copies of books over ebooks. Reasons given were the feel of 'real books,' a perceived unfairly high cost for eBooks, and the ease of sharing printed books. 'On questions of ebook pricing, 28% think that ebooks should be half their current price, while just 8% say that ebook pricing is right.' The preference for physical copies was in contrast to other forms of media, such as games, movies, and music, where a majority preferred the digital version."
Burn an Ebook? (Score:5, Interesting)
They reversed the age numerals (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm 61, not 16, and I prefer my eBook reader (my Android phone) for light fiction, especially when I'm trying to fall asleep or in a waiting room or eating a light meal in a coffee shop.
The price of Ebooks -- yes, way too high -- doesn't directly affect me, since my local library loans me eBooks. And then there's that huge public domain Gutenberg collection and others like it.
I'll pay for eBooks when they're half the price of mass-market paperbacks. Until then, I'll only read titles I can get for free.
Re:price (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it's not only about price. It's about the fact that the book can be read anywhere, without needing a battery charge or anything. Even many kids think about that. It's also less stressful for the eyes than looking at a screen.
I like reading regular books because I can arrange several of them on my desk or sit on the floor, arrange them around me and easy to flip back and forth inside any individual book or instantly context switch between books. With e-books flipping and switching from book to book is way more clumsy to do. However, e-books can be searched which is a huge bonus and I can even search for all books that contain a certain word of phrase using Spotlight on OS X/iOS. The biggest plus with e-books IMHO is portability. I have been converting my printed library to digital by a combination of buying ebooks versions of paper books that I own and scanning my old out-of-print paper books or downloading scanned books from projects like Gutenberg. Recently I put a stack of these paper books on a bathroom scale and measured the real-world weight of the library I keep on my iPad, it was well over 20kg. Basically I would not want to be without paper books but grabbing the iPad and knowing that you are carrying the contents of an entire 2m high bookshelf in your hand is undeniably cool and very convenient.
Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
You could (sort of) do it by masking the true test.
We're doing a study on eye strain as related to age. Please read these instructions (either screen based or paper instructions), and complete the attached (paper) quiz.
The participant believes the quiz is designed to evoke the eye strain, whereas it's just masking the true test - the instructions.
There are probably better ways to do this, it's the first idea I thought of....
Re:price and sharability (Score:5, Interesting)
I buy e-books from companies who expect me to treat them like physical books. If I lend a colleague a copy, I tell him if he likes it he should buy one. General speaking, (s)he does. Sometimes electronic, sometimes paper.
One publisher puts a "bookplate" in that says "This electronic copy of <title> belongs to David Collier-Brown, davecb@spamcop.net", in the top half of a page that contains a simplified set of terms and conditions, which explicitly says "treat me like a hardcover book".
I could remove it easily enough, it's just epub, but I don't care to. I agree with the publisher, and I want borrowers to know who they borrowed the book from, so they'll tell me if they buy their own. I expect most of my friends could pirate the book as well, and that they don't care to.
The publishers know I can pirate the book, but that I bought it. They take a risk that I may lend a copy to someone who "won't give it back", in the sense that he will keep it and won't buy his own copy. That tends to make me reluctant to lend him either electronic or physical books, just like I would if he didn't return a hardcover he borrowed.
In short, they expect most people are honest, can pirate and will buy books they like. See any of my postings about O'Reilly's Using Samba for proof that people did exactly that.
--dave
Re:price (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:price (Score:2, Interesting)
" I'm 24 and I prefer printed books because they are on paper."
Yes and they can be hollowed out to put your dope in and you can fix a wobbly table with one.
" It's kind of nice to take a break from staring at a screen all day. Also, you don't need a special setting to read a real live book in direct sunlight,"
With eReaders too. They are e-paper, not LCD screens and they are front lit if you want to.
You can change the font, the font size and if a word is unknown to you, you tap it an an explanation is shown, or a translation, or the wikipedia entry or...
You can use some special fonts for dyslexic people if you need to.
" and finally, you're exactly right; I've never had to charge any of my books.""
An I can balance 500 ebooks on my middle finger and nobody can secretly take one of my ebooks and take it to the bathroom.
I reclaimed a full room when I donated all my paper books that I had read in 45 years. I never ever gave one away before, so there were a couple of thousand.
Get Calibre, it's a total GUI catastrophe but it gets the job done, beautifully.
Also, flipping pages makes no noise, my wife loves that.
The only drawback is that I'm a pirate and so now I have 75.000 books to read and I have no time anymore, so, Ciao.