Reading On One's Phone Is A Growing Trend

The idea of reading on one's cell phone comes to no surprise to me as we pretty much use our smartphones for nearly everything these days... I'm not a huge fan of reading books on my cell phone as the screen is too small to read for long periods of time. 

However, to pass time on a recent flight home from visiting my parents earlier this month, I did find myself reading an ebook on my cell phone when I didn't want to dig out my paperback book from my carry-on luggage located in the overhead storage compartment.

I recently came across an article on the Wall Street Journal titled The Rise of Phone Reading by Jennifer Maloney. In her article, Maloney writes the following:

Ever since the first hand-held e-readers were introduced in the 1990s, the digital-reading revolution has turned the publishing world upside down. But contrary to early predictions, it’s not the e-reader that will be driving future book sales, but the phone.

“The future of digital reading is on the phone,” said Judith Curr, publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint Atria Books. “It’s going to be on the phone and it’s going to be on paper.” 

For now, tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire remain the most popular platform to read digital books. According to Nielsen, the percentage of e-book buyers who read primarily on tablets was 41% in the first quarter of 2015, compared with 30% in 2012.

But what has captured publishers’ attention is the increase in the number of people reading their phones. 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, according to a separate study commissioned by Nielsen.

The number of people who read primarily on phones has risen to 14% in the first quarter of 2015 from 9% in 2012.

Meanwhile, those reading mainly on e-readers, such as Kindles and Nooks, dropped over the same period to 32% from 50%. Even tablet reading has declined recently to 41% in the first quarter this year from 44% in 2014.

Click on above link to read Jennifer Maloney's entire story on the Wall Street Journal. It's a fascinating story about the pros of reading on one's smartphone!