Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Editor& Publisher this week published some very surprising findings from a study that showed, in terms of readers reading material both in print and online, “more text was read online than in print.” The study was part of a survey “in which 600 newspaper readers from six different newspapers were studied, utilized electronic eyetracking equipment that readers wore while they read broadsheet, tabloid and online editions of newspapers. The research, conducted last year, focused on 100 readers from each newspaper.” What the study found was that “when readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.”

This is pretty astounding, and it I think it goes a long way towards dispelling the myth that print is the perfect media/medium, and that its marriage with text is a marriage made in heaven. Instead, I think this study shows that, in many cases, the marriage between print and text is instead a marriage of convenience, and that the joining of the two was originally incidental (engineered to meet a function) rather than predestined (text invented to fill the page). Not to mention that, in an increasingly digital world, the relationship between print and text is becoming gradually anachronistic. So then, since print itself is not the point, what has become truly important is the content itself. What matters least of all is the paper and the ink.

Surprise: Study Finds Online Users Finish More Stories Than Print Readers