Can the digital book compete with television? A guest post by Jane Litte
One of the reasons I am such a fierce advocate of digital books is because I believe the greatest competition for books is not other books but other forms of entertainment. When every other form of entertainment is available on demand and books are not, books lose.
According to the American Time Use Survey (2008) of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans spend their leisure time as follows:
—Watching TV was the leisure activity that occupied the most time, accounting for about half of leisure time, on average, for both men and women. Socializing, such as visiting with friends or attending or hosting social events, was the next most common leisure activity, accounting for about three-quarters of an hour per day for both sexes.
—Time spent reading for personal interest and playing games or using a computer for leisure varied greatly by age. Individuals age 75 and over averaged 1.2 hours of reading per weekend day and 0.3 hour (17 minutes) playing games or using a computer for leisure. Conversely, individuals ages 15 to 19 read for an average of 0.2 hour (10 minutes) per weekend day while spending 1.0 hour playing games or using a computer for leisure.
So teens, the next generation of readers, are spending approximately 10 minutes a day reading whereas the baby boomers (who are also driving the digital reading boom) are reading 1.2 hours per day. That’s a huge gap! That gap is not going to be closed by slowing down the rate of digital availability of books.
The mantra of publishers has to be: we are going to be everywhere the consumer is in whatever form she wants us to be.
This means that if the reader wants to be entertained at 10 pm, she has a choice between books, tv/movies, and the internet; not simply tv/movies and the internet. This means that if she is stuck in some godforsaken family event with only her blackberry or iPhone to save her, she can download and read for 30 minutes in a dark corner of a room while her mother is looking for someone to wash the dishes and her father is yelling at the television. This means that if she lives more than 20 minutes away from a bookstore, has no public transportation, and no way to get to a bookstore, she has the option of accessing an entire catalog of books, not just the ones her roommate coopted from some friend with bad taste (god, if I see one more vampire book…)
The idea is to get more people to read. One way to get more people to read is ensure that there is broad access to reading choices because movie studios and television companies and gaming corporations are doing everything in their power to deliver in home consumption. Books have to be there too. And they can’t be tethered to one device. And they can’t be hard to access.
Books are facing an uphill battle against other powerful forms of entertainment. They cannot be harder to access, more difficult to obtain.
Embrace the mantra: Be everywhere in every form the reader wants. It’s one way to save publishing.
Jane Litte is a lawyer, an avid eBook reader, and the co-founder of the popular (and sometimes controversial) DearAuthor.com, “a romance review blog by readers for readers”. She blogs about books, technology, and life. They converge at some point.
