And tablets, which are priced similarly to top e-readers, also work well for reading e-books.
"Most consumers use tablets for entertainment purposes such as gaming, viewing multimedia content, browsing the internet and reading e-books, " said Richard Yu, Chairman of Huawei Device.
According to a recent report in the Harvard Health Letter, simple adjustments in the viewing angle can make us feel better as we spend hours reading e-books and working on our devices.
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E-readers are great for reading e-books.
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According to the Pew Internet Research Center, during the past year the number of Americans age 16 and older, reading e-books, has risen from 16 to 23 percent, while those who read printed books among the same age group fell from 72 percent to 67 percent.
Senator Claire McCaskill is calling the FAA out on its authorization of pilots to use iPads in the cockpit and flight attendants to use devices of their own, while restricting passengers from reading books on e-readers -- "A flying copy of 'War and Peace' is more dangerous than a Kindle, " she told the Times.
One of the concerns I hear from people who love bound books is that the sameness of touch and smell in e-books lessens the reading experience.
Kobo, which makes digital reading devices and operates an e-reading service that stocks 2.5 million books and has more than eight million users, has recently started looking at how readers as a whole engage with particular books and genres.
The survey also found that just slightly more people prefer e-books over print for reading in bed.
And traditional forms of reading, such as with books (even e-books), is something that boys at least do more rarely.
When I was growing up, the kind of people who today are lamenting the decline of physical books in the face of e-reading were busy bemoaning the decline of independent bookstores in the face of ruthless national chains.
Both ideas could increase the e-reader audience by expanding the ways and places to buy e-books and providing real-world incentives for reading.
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New e-reading services, which allow readers to purchase and store books in a digital library and read them on different devices, have some of the most sophisticated reader tracking software.
African-Americans, Hispanics, and those who live in lower-income households are more likely than others to say they would be interested in borrowing pre-loaded e-reading devices and take classes about how to use the devices and download books.
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She may well be right if the iPad and other tablet computers take off, the prices of dedicated e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle keep falling and more consumers start reading books on smart-phones.
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In recent years, however, the act of reading has undergone a rapid transformation, as devices such as the Kindle and iPad account for a growing share of book sales. (Amazon, for instance, now sells more e-books than hardcovers.) Before long, we will do most of our reading on screens lovely, luminous screens.
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The Nook e-reading app could also bolster Microsoft's efforts to establish a digital storefront to market apps, e-books and other content to go along with Windows 8, which is critical for the company's plans to enter the tablet market.
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