I recently came across Nick Earls’ article on The Conversation, ‘Has the print book trumped digital? Beware of glib conclusions.’ This article raises some important points about the data behind the statistics on ebook and paper book sales. Traditional sources of these statistics often fail to take into account works published by smaller publishers, or those that are self-published. These are becoming increasingly popular. Whilst it is easy to interpret statistics to find that ebook reading has peaked, Earls reminds us to look beyond the numbers to consider trends such as the recent popularity of adult colouring books which sell almost exclusively in paper form.
This article shows that there is much more research to be done in the area of digital reading. This research needs to go beyond figures to unpack the trends and rationales beneath it.