Earlier this year research showed that phone calls were officially the FIFTH most popular thing to do on a smart phone. Reading books (9 minutes, 22 seconds per day) naturally fell below the talk time (12 minutes, 6 seconds per day), but that is still rather significant.
This article (full piece here) from The Atlantic states that 25 million people in China use only their cell phones to read books. Amazing! The article suggests “Mobile reading may revive entire genres of literature, such as mid-length novels and poems, which have fallen out of favor.“
Possibly so and with 400 million mobile internet subscribers, China is the largest smart phone market. The rest of the world is bound to catch up. Recently Warren Buffett himself sounded convinced that newspapers would still be around in print form in the next 10-20 years even though he’s selling one of the newspaper companies he owns. Let’s hope Warren is around then to know if he’s right or wrong.
Cell phones, tablets, paper, whatever. Just keep reading! 🙂