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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