Page 108 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

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in his works and many interviews, the transfor- mations reading is undergoing affect the print and digital media alike. And these changes are not only related to the format reading materials come in but are affected by other facts directly linked to readers and the general context in which they live.
As Julio Alonso Arévalo points out, today’s readers are transitional readers who switch from paper to screen, read in a host of situations and browse a broad variety of contents, formats and channels:
Sometimes it is viewed as something incompatible, but it isn’t at all: I’m a digital reader but I also read on paper. Readers who only read digitally make up 6% of the total. Most of us are transitional readers who have no qualms about reading certain books on paper and others digitally. There is a place for everything. Evidently digital books provide new characteristics that their paper versions do not offer us, such as the possibility of turning content into a multimedia experience by incorporating various media, making it a transmedia product
in the same way as it is a digital book. It has considerable advantages but this fictitious struggle between digital and analogue is senseless. A book is a book regardless of the format it comes in. One kind has certain characteristics, the other kind
has different ones and you can choose. The new trend is not going to destroy books but quite the opposite – it is going to enhance them with new ways of reading. Everyone can choose.5
But do we read digitally?
As a result of the development of mobile tech- nology, coupled with the constant increase in ways of reading and writing that the Internet offers, more and more people are searching for information and other kinds of reading mate- rials on the Web. The various data gleaned by surveys, reports and studies on digital reading in Spain point to considerable growth in digital devices in the country, be they smartphones, tablets or e-readers. Similarly, reports on user
and consumer habits show that a growing num- ber of people are increasingly using these devices for different purposes that involve reading and writing in some way. Though, as José Antonio Cordón states, “the figures provided by the various studies and reports published all over the world are all highly unspecific, and it is therefore difficult to ascertain how much and, above all, how people read”.6
Indeed, the surveys used as a basis for monitor- ing reading rates need to be revised and updated in accordance with readers’ new practices in the digital environment. But everything indicates that we are increasingly reading in digital format. Alonso Arévalo also stresses this:
If you analyse what digital reading is, it is not only reading electronic books. If we speak of electronic books, only about 20% or 30% of the population read digital books. A survey conducted a few months ago asked how many people were digital readers and indeed it was 30%, but when they were asked how much time they spent reading
in digital format and how much on paper, it turns out that they were reading much more digitally. They devoted 80% of their reading time to digital, because they read other things like magazines, blogs and newspapers. Books are the last element to be incorporated into the widespread digitisation trend and they are taking the longest to adapt.7
His comment refers to a survey8 of 1,755 people aged between 18 and 69 carried out in Japan in 2012 and published in 2017, which showed that they preferred to read from print. The main finding, however, was that approximately 70% of these people’s total reading time was devoted to digital media, indicating a clear discrepancy between real reading habits and stated prefer- ences in the sample analysed.
Complementary but different
Although reading patterns vary from print to digital, in the crossovers from one side to the
READING
Readers in the digital age