I see you on the ferry, reading ebooks on your phone, your i-something, or your tablet computer. It’s awfully handy to have a long book that doesn’t weigh more than an obese cat, isn’t it?

Here’s something to think about as you leave Descanso Bay and settle in for twenty minutes of that novel you’ve got on your whatever-it-is. As you read your ebook, Your E-Book Is Reading You. From wsj.com:

It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy on the Kobo e-reader—about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them. And on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first Hunger Games book is to download the next one.

In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.

For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public. [continue]