Reading a book via four formats: paperback, Kindle, audiobook, and iPhone

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured an article about Ann Kirschner’s experience reading a book via four formats: paperback, Kindle, audiobook, and iPhone. Kirschner, university dean of William E. Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York and resident of NYC, decided to switch amongst the four reading options as she went about her daily routine. She notes, “It was often maddening to keep finding and losing my place as I switched from format to format. But as an experiment, it taught me a great deal about my reading habits, and about how a text reveals itself differently as the reading context changes. Along the way, I also began to make some predictions about winners and losers in the evolution of books.” She went on to say, “I’ve been dreading this, but let me get my prediction out now: The iPhone is a Kindle killer…I abandoned the Kindle edition of Little Dorrit almost as soon as I read one chapter on my iPhone. Kindle, shmindle. It does almost nothing that an iPhone can’t do better — and most important, the iPhone is always with me.” The article is very interesting and worth a read.