I’m in Chicago at meetings the next few days so posts may be sporadic. On the flight up here today, I was reading more of Jason Merkoski’s Burning the Page and came across an interesting statistic.  He stated that there was a 7 percent shift from year to year in e-reader usage among the US adult population when the blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey  was published. Now I am a bit skeptical of this statistic which seems to confuse correlation with causation.

But books have been responsible for contributing to significant social change. One thinks of Uncle Tom’s Cabin of which President Lincoln allegedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe upon meeting her in 1862,  ‘So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!’ I think of John F Kennedy’s Profiles of Courage and its influence on the generation of the 60s that thought it could change the world. Perhaps it is not so preposterous to think of Fifty Shades driving a change in the way we read…

What I wonder about though is what kinds of books do we read on e-readers? Stowe and Kennedy were not writing profound philosophy or great literary works but they were exploring elevated themes. I’ve not read Fifty Shades, but I gather it deals with an entirely different form of “elevation’! I can say I’ve read some fun things like Agatha Christie as well as serious works like Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow  on my Kindle.  But I’m probably not your typical reader.

I’m interested in what kinds of books people are reading on e-readers. Are they mostly used for popular works? If we read serious works on them, do we read them the same way?  For example, I notice e-readers are much less friendly to footnotes–well formatted ones hyperlink to them but many simply confine them to endnotes not easily accessed.

What kinds of books do you like to read on your e-reader, and what types don’t you read on e-readers?