I’ve just started through the study…I’m converting the pdf to have my Kindle read it to me on a commute, of course. 😉
It’s a study from the University of California at San Diego about information consumption. It’s by Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short.
They say:
“U.S. households in 2008 spent about 5 percent of their information time reading newspapers, magazines and books, which have declined in readership over the last fifty years.”
However, they say that reading itself has increased.
They also say:
“Printed books – on which Americans spent barely 2 percent of their information time, and 4 percent of words – may someday be displaced by digital devices such as the Amazon Kindle, but the electronic book platforms had more potential than actual readers in 2008. Yet, in many ways electronic documents have already taken over for paper…”
Looks like a great study! I’ll let you know more when I’ve had a chance to go through it thoroughly.
You can get it here.
On any Kindle except a Kindle one, you can download the pdf and just put it right into your Kindle’s documents folder, if you want. I prefer being able to enlarge the text and use the text-to-speech, so I’m sending it for conversion to my free Kindle address (by putting the word “convert” in the subject line). More on that in this previous post. It’s possible it won’t be converted if it has security, but we’ll see.
This post by Bufo Calvin first appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
I Love My Kindle 
December 31, 2009 at 2:07 pm |
That report is unlikely to be useable on the converted version for the Kindle. The PDF is loaded with graphs, pictures, dual columns and other stuff that normally doesn’t translate well. It is not so large that it cannot be read on your computer however. If I remember, only 37 pages.
December 31, 2009 at 3:11 pm |
Thanks for writing, Al!
Actually, I’ve enjoyed listening to it on the commute. It does take a bit of mental discipline, since the captions for those images get stuck in the middle of the main text. I plan to look at the graphics on a computer after I’ve gone through the report.
I’ve never been a big one for graphics…I used to drive my subordinates nuts when they would bring me an Excel graph on which they’d worked for hours, and I’d ask them to just give me the numbers instead. I am a little disappointed when people don’t provide a table under the graphic with the numbers for people who prefer that…but I know that’s not typical.