E-Readers Grow in Popularity

By: Katie Sullivan
Posted In: News

Cozying up by the fire with a good Kindle. Basking in the hot sun on the beach with a Nook. Wait a minute. Something here is not right, but it could be soon. Companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble see the future of reading as electronic rather than paper.

Since the release of Amazon’s Kindle in November of 2007, readers have viewed e-books as just another fad. But, with recent increases in sales of the Kindle DX and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, some are saying e-readers could be the beginning of the revolution the book world has feared.

Seeming to be the first real competition to the Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook has had an overwhelming reception. By the time the first shipment was delivered at the end of November 2009, just a month after advanced sales had begun, Barnes & Noble found itself out of stock as orders continued to pour in. With the Nook making its debut halfway through the third quarter, Barnes & Noble showed a 33 percent increase of overall profits from the previous year.

The Nook makes it seem like e-readers are a new craze, but the Kindle is already on its third generation. This trend has been kept alive by users who love the new way to read. In a survey done by the NPD Marketing Research Group, 93 percent of e-reader users loved their e-reader.

People seemed to be flocking to e-readers, but Mark Higgins, a sales associate and local Nook expert at the Middletown Barnes & Noble, says he is not worried that e-readers will put books out of business.

“It will never get to the level to kill bricks and mortar,” Higgins said. “It’s just a convenience.”

E-readers are a convenience that Higgins said many are choosing. He said the store has been crazy with customers looking to buy the Nook because of its portable small size and weight and the ability to download books instantly without going to a store.

“There’s no need to waste the time coming into the store when it’s at your fingertips,” Higgins said.

In addition to its technical features, E-books are between 40 and 60 percent cheaper than their traditional counterparts. Rather than carrying one book at a time, users are able to carry up to 1,500 titles at one time on an e-reader.

Being able to carry multiple titles drew Salve Regina University junior Adam Bitzer to the Nook.

“Since I move between home and school, it’s easier than carrying five or six books back and forth,” Bitzer said.

Bitzer chose the Nook over the Kindle because he wanted a store to go to if he encountered any problems. This was more important than the bigger screen of the Kindle DX.

Rich Dowd, a senior biology and chemistry major at Salve Regina University and self-proclaimed tech junkie, said although he wanted the Kindle for its modern features, it took a little while for him to get used to reading a screen rather than a book.

“I missed the feeling of an actual book in my hand and turning pages,” Dowd said.

With the Senate reviewing a bill that would make electronic text books free, Dowd said he would download books for courses like philosophy and capstone, but would stick to the traditional text books for his science classes.

Dowd says a problem he has with the Kindle is that the input feature is not good for note taking. Also the screen is not good for analyzing graphs. These issues prevent Dowd from putting his science books on his Kindle because he is required to take notes in the margin and study complex figures.

Recently, publishing companies have been fighting to raise the prices of e-books from their current standard price of $9.99 to $12.99-$14.99. Some publishers have even pulled their books from Amazon.com until the prices were raised.

Dowd said the change in price will not affect the rate at which he purchases e-books.

“For me, cheaper is cheaper,” Dowd said.

Olga Verbeek, Salve Regina’s McKillop Library’s systems coordinator for the last 12 years, sees the e-reader as just another step forward for McKillop Library’s resources.

McKillop Library currently has one Kindle for students to borrow. That Kindle is preloaded with books the library has bought.

Although McKillop Library only has one Kindle to loan out, many of the e-books found on the library’s website can be downloaded to a personal e-reader. Ebrary, offered through McKillop’s website, has an application for e-readers. They also offer WorldCat Local which can be accessed through a PDA or Blackberry.

Verbeek had a chance to test the Kindle when Salve first purchased it. She loved having the ability to increase the size of the text and dim or brighten the screen depending on the conditions she was reading in.