But are they really reading?
However, as the amount of e-reading in China has increased, so have concerns over the influence of e-reading on the quality of individual's reading habits. Many worry that with the change of mediums, the depth and quality of reading experiences will decrease and readers will become accustomed to skimming, utilitarian reading (as opposed to reading for self-reflection or development), and a growing fragmentation of reading materials.
Moreover, there is concern that while readers may be making the jump to electronic forms of reading, high quality reading content is not. Much of what is read on electronic reading devices (cell phones in particular) would be considered pulp fiction in the United States and, according to the above-mentioned IIMedia survey, novels (typically of a lower-quality, mass-produced sort) account for a full 83% of cell phone reading, leaving little room for works of greater depth or cultural value.
Part of this is accounted for by the space electronic mediums tend to occupy. Cell phone and e-reader users tend to use their devices to fill the spare moments so prevalent in a society where almost everyone uses public transportation – time spent waiting for busses, trains, breaking between meetings, and unwinding before bed are all times when electronic reading tends to be most prevalent. Admittedly, these times are probably not ideal for the sort of complex, cognitively taxing works heralded by most societies as pinnacles of literature or history.
However, there is also a deeper reason behind this lack of deep reading. Really good quality material truly is challenging to find in electronic form, in part because most electronic readers are still young people uninterested in more difficult works, making publishers reluctant to publish these works in the first place. However, the primary reason for the relative scarcity of high-quality reading material seems to have more to do with the supply of such works than their demand. Many authors are reluctant to publish higher quality material via electronic mediums for fear that, once published, their income would plummet as pirated copies of their work flood the market and drown out income from their paper works. Because of concerns such as these only 20-30% of written works are ever published in electronic form and, when they are, they often come six months to a year after the publishing of their paper counterparts.
But, despite misgivings over reading quality, it seems likely that electronic reading will continue to become ever more prevalent in Chinese society. Electronic reading has already slowly begun replacing paper reading, with paper reading rates decreasing from 60.4% in 1999 to 48.7% in 2005, though it is unclear whether the trend will continue. However, if one thing is clear, it is that, if the evolution of paper-based reading mediums is any indicator, electronic reading itself likely has a lot of changing left to do.
