E-books A Popular Use For Tablets

By Author: Robert Gordon
Total Articles: 4
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In a fast-paced world where consumers are usually on the go, it's difficult to always have a way to access information that is both easy and convenient. Checking things such as email, social media and news websites can be difficult on a small cell phone screen, but laptops are usually too bulky and heavy to carry around. When the tablet was introduced, it changed everything.

But tablets are not just a way to check email away from home. Instead, this new technological device was intended to be used for media consumption — and one of the most common forms of media being consumed is books.

Most tablets come equipped with an e-reader app. Some, such as Amazon's Kindle, are only able to process digital books. However, the latter merely fulfills a small percentage of the market, which is dominated by the Apple iPad at 68 percent.

Those who use their tablets to read are also reading more than before. According to a Pew study, those who read paper books average 15 per year while those reading electronically read 24 books annually. This may ...
... be related to the ease of downloading a book straight to the tablet instead of buying one at a bookstore, or the usually reduced prices for digital copies. Books in the public domain are also available to download for free, and can come pre-installed.

This trend could be helping the planet, especially when tablets are used to read newspapers. A RAND full lifecycle analysis stated that e-readers and tablets are helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions from a lack of publishing and distributing paper items. Using the devices to read can lower emissions by up to 89 percent, “assuming that all the GHG emissions associated with producing and operating e-readers or tablet computers are ascribed to reading.”

Using tablets to read has also helped shift the market demographically. In 2010, 62 percent of tablet owner were younger than 34 and only 10 percent were older than 55, with 46 percent of all e-readers being female. By 2011, only 46 percent were under the age of 34 and percentage of those older than 55 had increased to 19 percent, with 61 percent of all users being female.

These were also hot gift items last holiday season: according to another Pew Research Center study, ownership of e-readers and tablets doubled from 10 to 19 percent over the holiday season.

"These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers," the report stated.

It was suggested that the price of devices such as the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet, which are much lower than traditional tablets, played a large part in the surge. Both of these are marketed mainly as tablets upon which to read books, unlike major brand tablets such as Lenovo tablets.