Bringing digital reading to the bus
Amy Gahran
When online media first arose, one of the common complaints about it
was that it wasn’t very portable. Unlike books or magazines, you
couldn’t easily read your desktop or laptop on the bus or in the
bathroom.
But mobile digital media hold the promise of a return to convenient
portable reading. And new statistics from the popular online reading
list service ReadItLater indicate that mobile devices are not only
changing where people are reading but when.
 ReadItLater is a free service that allows internet users to save the
full text of articles and other content they encounter online on a
personal reading list. It then displays this content in a format that’s
very friendly to mobile devices.
I use ReadItLater (and one of its competitors, Instapaper) to save
longer-format content (like 5,000-word Harper’s articles) for later
digital reading in a way that I find easier on the eyes than extended
reading sessions on a Web browser.
Almost always, this means reading articles on my Android phone -
usually when I’m on public transit or waiting in line somewhere but
often also when I’m lying in bed. According to a recent ReadItLater blog
post, users of this service save articles to their lists at a fairly
constant pace throughout the day, but they read this content mostly in
the evening, from 6 to 9 p.m.
But when ReadItLater took a close look at statistics for its iPhone
and iPad users, a different there tended to be four peak reading times:
• 6 a.m.: Early morning, breakfast
• 9 a.m.: Morning commute, start of the workday
• 5-6 p.m.: End of the workday, commute home
• 8-10 p.m.: Couch time, prime time, bedtime
“In reality, this really is a graph of whitespace time,” says the
post. “Whitespace is the time between A and B. It’s the time on the
subway or bus. It’s the time standing in line. It’s a spare moment.”
For iPad users, ReadItLater noticed one especially huge peak reading
time: 8 to 10 p.m. “This time slot is the same one coveted by
television. When the majority of people are consuming content it seems
perfectly natural that people would use this time to do their reading as
well.”
ReadItLater also found that “iPad owners are no longer doing the
majority of their reading on their computers.”
This makes sense to me, since iPads are primarily media consumption
devices while computers and smartphones are better suited for
communication and content creation.
ReadItLater did not offer statistics for Android devices, but this
service does not offer its own Android app. The NewsRoom Android app by
Trileet Inc. is supported by the ReadItLater API and is one option for
Android users.
- CNN
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