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The range of choice available to everybody on a plane is taking a huge leap with the spread of WiFi. That means that immersive book reading on a plane is about to get a huge dose of additional competition. That should almost certainly lead to less book reading on planes. One would imagine this will show up first in reduced book sales at airport bookshops.
Will WiFi mean LESS book-reading on planes?
February 14, 2009 | 12:27 pm
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By Mike Shatzkin, CEO of Idea Logical Company
Mike Shatzkin is a leading book industry consultant. This is a slightly edited excerpt, reproed with his permission, from a recent post to the Reading 2.0 list. – D.R.
The range of choice available to everybody on a plane is taking a huge leap with the spread of WiFi. That means that immersive book reading on a plane is about to get a huge dose of additional competition. That should almost certainly lead to less book reading on planes. One would imagine this will show up first in reduced book sales at airport bookshops.Until very recently, the only really portable entertainment choices were music on an Walkman and then an iPod (not counting transistor radio, of course), a newspaper, a magazine, or a book. Now everything travels.
One of the Big Questions that Nobody Knows the Answer To is: "Will today’s kids be interested in 50,000 and 100,000 word narratives when they grow up?" Even though nobody "knows," the airplane news just shifted the odds further toward "less than they do now."
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Comments:
What this posting seems to point to is that given a choice people will immediately switch from books to almost anything else. The people who are going to forgo reading a book on a plane for WiFi are not the people who are going to be reading a book on a plane anyway, they’re going to be the people who either have their laptops out as soon as the flight attendant says that it’s “safe” to turn on electronics, or the people who aren’t doing anything anyway. I don’t really know why we’re worried about in-flight reading anyway, there isn’t that much of it going on.
I think Clark is right. Most of the people reading books on planes are people that enjoy the medium outside of travel. I expect it to effect Southwest travelers significantly when you consider they don’t even offer in-flight movies to pass the time. Its BYOE (entertainment) with books, magazines, iPod/Phone vids/tunes the most common choices.
IMO it is the magazine industry that will suffer the most with the addition of airplane WiFi. The only time I even purchase a magazine now is on flights longer than 3 hours. Given free WiFi and a netbook, with reasonable battery life, I wouldn’t go into airport news stores for anything other than gum.