Definitely interesting… not too surprising that there has been a bump in mobile reading over that past few years - seeing as everyone's phone screens are twice as big as they were in 2012. Anecdotally, I am more likely to read on my phone now than I was a few years ago (I always used to reach for my iPad before I had an iPhone 6).

When reviewing these stats, we should keep in mind the primary use case of Wikipedia - a reference. While it is true that some will read significant portions of a book or a blog posts on their phones, most people aren't looking to read a Wikipedia article from top-to-bottom. Some will read a section or 2, while many others will only need to ready the first paragraph to get the answer that they need. 

So even as the number of "long form readers" increases on mobile, that might not directly translate into more "full article Wikipedia readers" on mobile.

I definitely believe we should continue improving our mobile reading experience - it will only become more important as these numbers increase, however we shouldn't draw to many conclusions from this article as the content being discussed is quite different.


On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 12:31 PM, Tilman Bayer <tbayer@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Forwarding to the public list too.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tilman Bayer <tbayer@wikimedia.org>
Date: Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 9:40 PM
Subject: Interesting WSJ article: "The Rise of Phone Reading"
To: Internal communication for WMF Reading team
<reading-wmf@lists.wikimedia.org>


Some food for thought - it's probably not entirely surprising in 2015,
but this article collects a lot of information showing that the
assumption "few people want to read long texts on a phone" is too
simplistic: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-phone-reading-1439398395

TLDR from our perspective: Smartphones are becoming a major venue for
reading ebooks, ie. really long-form texts, more than was predicted a
few years ago. ("In a Nielsen survey of 2,000 people this past
December, about 54% of e-book buyers said they used smartphones to
read their books at least some of the time. That’s up from 24% in
2012.") One reason is convenience - “The best device to read on is the
one you have with you"/"Most people who read on their phones toggle
back and forth between devices, using whichever is closest at hand
when opportunity strikes". Another is that screen sizes are getting
bigger.
Also has some bits about how book publishers react to this, which may
of course be less applicable to us.

[...]
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Tilman Bayer
Senior Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB

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Corey Floyd
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