The state of e-book reading in the United States in 2012

This is the first comprehensive examination of the reading habits of the general U.S. population since e-books have come to prominence. The Pew Internet Project conducted several surveys in December 2011, January 2012 and February 2012 to complete the work reported here. The PEW report contains data about the general reading habits of Americans; the state of e-book reading; where and how readers get their books and the difference among e-book reading device ownersThe emergence of e-books has disrupted industries and institutions that have enjoyed relatively stable practices, policies, and businesses for decades. Widespread consumer interest in e-books began in late 2006 with the release of Sony Readers and accelerated after Amazon’s Kindle was unveiled a year later. By the end of 2011, there were widespread reports about the exploding demand for e-books, both for purchases and for borrowing from libraries.This work will be useful to library patrons and librarians in discerning how libraries can serve their constituents in a world where “books” are becoming very different from what they have traditionally been; newspapers draw bigger audiences online than they do in print; maps are becoming multimedia productions; magazines and journals are structured to facilitate conversations; historical artifacts can be understood in new ways; digital databases can be accessed on the fly from smartphones and tablets; and knowledge-creation itself is becoming a crowdsourced activity of aggregating networked information.