Last Monday, we talked about e-book lending at libraries. It seems most of us are not only not concerned about it, but like this development and plan to make use of it (I just downloaded my second library e-book over the weekend).

In the discussion, though, the inevitable topic of whether or not someone would ever become an “e-book reader” versus a “real-book reader” came up, which reminded me of something I heard in a workshop a couple of weeks ago, which went something along these lines:

To be a breakout author, you must reach non-readers (these are not e-book readers).

He went on to say that these “non-readers” are people who read at most six books a year (so, in other words, not true non-readers, but rarely-readers). These are people who would buy a book if Oprah recommended it and it struck their fancy in some manner. More often than not, though, even if they buy books from the bestsellers lists, it’s more to have a conversation piece sitting on their shelf during dinner parties (or to have their guests think they’ve read it when they haven’t touched it since they got it home from B&N)—there’s no way they’re going to invest over $100 in an e-reader when they don’t even want to invest that much in books in one year.

So who are e-book readers? Are they technoheads who are just now discovering the world of the written word because they can access it through cool technology now?

Well, I did some rudimentary research and though I tried every iteration of keywords that I could think of, I could only find technical info when it came to the question “who reads e-books?” (more men prefer tablets, more women prefer e-readers; e-reader ownership broke into double-digits percentage-wise this year; e-book sales are soaring; etc.).

My own personal opinion is that avid e-book readers are book *consumers*—not in the capitalist sense of the word, but in the black-hole-in-outer-space sense of the word. They consume books. They are the “so many books, so little time” type of readers who rarely go back and re-read a book just to savor and re-live it. They are the same kind of people who, in decades past, would visit the library once a week and max out the number of books they were allowed to check out each time. AND they would be at the bookstore at least a couple of times a month taking home four or five mass-market paperbacks. AND if one of their favorite authors had a new book coming out, they’d pre-order the hardcover through the bookstore just to make sure they got their copy of it the day it released. AND even before that, they were the kids who pored over the Scholastic book order forms from school and if their allowance wouldn’t cover the number of books they wanted to order, they negotiated with their parents—even going as far as to offer to do more chores, just to score more books. These are the people for whom books are their addiction . . . an addiction that the e-book reader makes that much easier to feed because of instant gratification of less-than-60-second download times; availability of hundreds of thousands of titles, a great number of which are free or priced under $5, making it much more economical; the ease of transport—one’s entire library can be carried in a purse or briefcase or backpack; the intrinsic privacy afforded by the e-reader’s design—no more trying to hide those half-naked women and bare-chested men or Twilight movie tie-in covers from everyone else on the subway; and the wide variety of platforms from which e-books can be read: designated readers, tablet computers, phones, and computers/laptops.

But there are just as many people like this who will give up their traditional pulp-and-glue books only when someone pries them out of their cold, dead hands. Because e-books/e-readers are the topic du jour, it’s pretty easy to find studies on their effect on reading habits.

According to a study conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group (a different Nielsen than the TV ratings people), there is a difference in reading paper books and e-books. They tested three different reading methods (on the PC, on a Kindle, and on an iPad) against reading a paper book. The results were a bit eye-opening . . . those reading any of the three e-book versions were as much as 10 percent slower than those reading a traditional paper book (with PC being the slowest method).

The University of Washington reported on a pilot project they conducted with students using e-books instead of traditional textbooks. “Seven months into the study, less than 40 percent of the students were regularly doing their academic reading on the Kindle.”

The most interesting part to me of UW’s report was this:

The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues such as the location on the page and the position in the book to go back and find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read.

I ran into this last night. I read the prologue of the library e-book I’d downloaded. It had a date at the top of it. Some time in the late 1700s. The prologue felt long. In the printed book, it may have only been four, five, or six pages. But as I didn’t have the “cognitive map” of how long it was, it felt long. But then I started the first chapter, which also had a date at the top of it. Some time in the early 1800s. I tried using the navigation “rocker” to go back to the beginning of the prologue, but this e-book apparently doesn’t have the “locations” in the book mapped to be able to skip from the beginning of one chapter to another by using the navigation button that way. And that frustrated me, because I knew that if I’d been reading the physical book, it would have been so easy to just flip back a few pages and look at the date at the beginning of the prologue.

After reading the information in these two studies, I’ve come up with my own opinion of why we might read traditional paper books faster than e-books, and it boils down to three things:

1. The visual cue of how far through the book we are. I’m sorry, but the percentage down at the bottom just doesn’t mean much to me. One percent of the first Game of Thrones book might represent seven or eight physical pages, while one percent of Mary Balogh’s Dark Angel (a novella) might be one physical page, maybe a page and a half. It can really start to feel like a chore when you’re reading, reading, reading for what seems like hours and look down and the percentage hasn’t moved, or has only advanced one or two percent. Plus, there are a lot of e-books that have a lot of “spam” at the end of them. Many publishers have taken to putting all of their frontmatter (copyright info, dedication, acknowledgments, review quote blurbs) into the “back” of the e-book along with a bunch of marketing stuff for that author’s other books or other authors’ books. I’ve had a few e-books in which the last page of the actual story fell somewhere around the 90 to 95 percent mark because there was so much backmatter—and there are books in which the first page of the story (whether it’s the prologue or chapter one) starts around the 5 percent mark because there’s so much frontmatter (which may include a five- or six-page table of contents, in books in which the chapters aren’t even named). Seeing how much I’ve actually read—or seeing how much I have left to read (in that chapter or in the book)—can really motivate me to keep reading.

2. This whole “cognitive mapping” thing. There’s definitely something to this—because when I read, I have a tendency to skip lines or phrases and miss things. In a physical book, it’s easy enough to go back and find something I might have missed—or, in the case of books as long and with as many characters as the Game of Thrones series, to flip back to that character’s last chapter to remind myself what they were doing last time they appeared. But this is difficult and time consuming to do in an e-reader.

3. Seeing the actual book, and its cover, sitting there waiting to be picked up again. One thing I most definitely miss with e-books is the loss of the cover. Sure, some e-books come with a black-and-white image of the book’s cover. But many don’t. However, when I pick up my e-reader (which has a purple leather cover), I either pull up a list of titles or it opens to the most recent page I was reading when I last turned it off. I don’t have a full-color cover drawing me in. When I’m going through my list of books to see what I want to read next, I can’t just pull one off the shelf and read the back cover copy. I have to pull it up, turn on the wireless/3G, and go to that book’s page on Amazon just to read the description (which aren’t usually the full back-cover copy—and sometimes, it’s just a list of blurbs from reviews that don’t tell me anything about the story at all). The cover is not only the first piece of marketing for the book, it’s the first thing that draws us into it—especially if it’s a well done cover and reflects the theme, mood, and emotion of the story. Having the visual cue of the cover can be a great motivator to pick up a book and start/continue/finish reading it.

Are you an e-reader? If you are, what are your thoughts on e-books vs. traditional books? What would make you choose an e-book over a traditional paper book (or vice versa)? If you are a sworn traditional-book reader, is there anything that could convert you to becoming an e-book reader?