A comment that’s not related directly, but maybe peripherally: At the height of the Harry Potter craze, when people were standing in line, some in costume, to buy the latest installment on release at midnight, I saw a lot of verbiage about how the series was encouraging kids to read.
I didn’t feel like waiting around for some Ph.D. dissertation to be summarized in an obscure news article, so I asked a librarian. She in turn consulted her colleagues at the branch before answering me.
The essence of her response was that the popularity of the series seemed to be adding books to the reading lists of kids who were already readers, but it didn’t seem to be actually adding many new readers. They did not see a significant upsurge in library use or membership, just an upsurge in demand for those particular books, and, of course, anything “like” them.
I wonder if it’s something similar for e-readers: that they’re changing the way readers read, and maybe prompting some duplicate purchases, just as we once bought music CDs of our old vinyl favorites, without winning many new converts.
I’m pretty sure that if someone gave me one of those game box things, I wouldn’t feel any more like playing video games than I do now, no matter how accessible and convenient.