I'm sitting in the coffee shop with my laptop attempting to write this afternoon. The Internet service at my house has been abysmally slow since Saturday's extreme winds. Besides that, while I'm working at home, all my undone chores gang up on me and distract me from the wonderful world of session-based voice (and media) communication. So after a solid hour or so of writing, I look up from my laptop screen and see 4 people reading paper books (3 paperback, 1 hardcover) and one guy reading an iPad screen. No Kindles. No Nooks. To further confound my impressions of the whole e-book revolution thing, the guy reading on his iPad looks to be in his mid-40s, definitely not a millennial. Of the paperback readers, 2 appear to be millennials and one appears closer to Gen X. The hardback reader looks to be about the same age as iPad guy.
It's possible that the rest of the millennials here are reading on their Android phones, but it looks more like they're texting.
What's going on here? Every time I go outside of my house and see what's going on in the real world, I see far fewer Kindles than I see when I'm hunkered down in my house reading the online media about media. It's not that this patch of world is deficient in young digital natives, there are both a major university campus and a community college within walking distance. There are plenty of young people in the coffee shop, they just seem to use books as their content delivery mechanism.
Oh brave new world that has such creatures in it...
Edited to add: A millennial boy with a Kindle came in and started reading shortlly before I left the coffee shop but after I posted this entry. So the count now includes 1 Kindle. Still tied with iPad and behind "book".
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