Some Western Massachusetts booksellers are taking steps to reap some benefit from the trend by selling e-readers themselves, although they say the new wave isn't exactly a tsunami.
A study released by the Pew Internet Research Center last week shows that electronic reading devices, or “e-readers,” are changing the way people read.
Some local booksellers are taking steps to reap some benefit from the trend by selling e-readers themselves, although they say the new wave isn’t exactly a tsunami.
“I think there are small incremental changes we see every year,” said Roxie Mack, co-owner of the Broadside Bookshop in Northampton, “but it’s not at the rate people have been predicting.”
“I think people are going to read in all different kinds of ways,” said Joan Grenier, owner of the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley.
At the Westfield Athenaeum, the city’s public library, technology services librarian Tegan Mannino said the boom in technology has translated into “getting new patrons and serving long-term patrons in a new way.”
On the other hand, while circulation at her library has “skyrocketed” in the past year, “e-book lending is comparatively a small fraction of what we circulated,” Mannino said.
The Pew study showed that in the past year, the number of Americans over age 16 who had read an electronic book went from 16 percent to 23 percent. The percentage of people who owned e-readers rose from 18 to 33 percent.
The study, which was based on phone interviews with 2,252 people, also revealed that readers of traditional books dropped from 72 percent to 67 percent.
Only 75 percent of those surveyed reported reading any book at all in the past year.
In response to the technological trend, both Odyssey and Broadside sell not only paper books but e-readers by Kobo, a company that has 10 million users worldwide and a library of 3 million e-books.
Thanks to a contract Kobo has signed with the American Bookseller’s Association, bookstores get a percentage every time a user downloads a book.
“We’re delighted to be in the market this way, but we definitely have customers who enjoy and read ‘physical’ books,” said Grenier, referring to traditional paper books. Her bookstore stocks both the Kobo Mini and the Kobo Glo.
Some books, such as academic books, art books and photography books, don’t lend themselves to e-readers, Grenier said.
“The Irish Legacy,” a coffee-table book produced by The Republican, is another example of a book that doesn’t translate readily to electronic reading.
Nat Herold, owner of Amherst Books, said he owns an electronic tablet but doesn’t feel comfortable with it. “I can’t flip back,” he said, “and I can’t make notes in the margin.”
In spite of the Pew study, there may be evidence that e-reading is flattening out. On a nationwide level, Grenier said, booksellers have found that electronic reading “didn’t grow as they thought it would – and growth is slowing.”
Mannino said the Westfield Athenaeum had a big burst of people signing up for library cards after Christmas in 2011 because they had gotten e-readers for Christmas and wanted to check out e-books for free, but the phenomenon was not repeated this year.