TeleRead Asks: What are your reading habits?

 By Colleen T. Reese

Editor’s note: The following post is the first in what we hope will be an ongoing series of articles on e-reading applications and technology by Colleen T. Reese, who currently works as a new media marketing manager for NAPCO, the B2B publishing company that owns and operates TeleRead.com. As Colleen explains in the following post, she’s developed a survey that those of us here at TeleRead hope will help us “find and research various tools, apps and resources” that might ultimately improve your own unique e-reading experience.

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Q. What Are Your Reading Habits?

While that may seem like an obvious—and perhaps irrelevant—question, it is nevertheless a question we are genuinely curious about.

Why?

Both historically and contemporarily, the most primary function of an e-reader is to accommodate a lifestyle—reading—for a hugely diverse group of people who read in hugely diverse ways.

I wouldn’t call it a stretch to say that today’s e-reading prototypes have accomplished this obvious functionality. But successfully accomplishing this function on an individual, evolved level is still not quite within our grasp.

Does an e-reader serve the same function for me as it does for you? Are you merely a person who uses an e-reader? Or are you a person who typically uses an e-reader, say, outside during the evening hours, or while relaxing in bed before falling asleep, or with a cup of coffee in the early morning?

I don’t mean to marginalize the amount of market research that goes into each of these products, but the victories over surface level functionality on a mass scale certainly should not be the end of all e-reader development. Shouldn’t the hardware match the contextual clues found in user data?

While the idea of an e-reader or tablet specifically developed for a behavioral demographic may seem like an eerily Big Brother-esque marketing stunt, think of it as akin to gaming computers: The personal computing industry has done a stand-up job at creating an emotional, lifestyle connection with one of its markets’ most demanding demographics: They have actually met the specific needs of its consumer.

So when will e-readers and their communities demand that very same granular level of functionality?

Q. What does any of this have to do with Teleread?

Good question. Below, you’ll find a survey with a series of questions that we’re very interested in having you answer. We won’t use the answers to make predictions or espouse declarations about digital reading behaviors in general. But we will use the information to find and research various tools, apps and resources that help to draw that connection from basic function to unique function.

As a content provider, TeleRead really isn’t all that different from a hardware provider: We serve a function, but we’d like to serve an evolved function.

So, TeleReaders … how do you really read? Let us know by filling in the survey below. And as always, thanks for reading.

Note: You can also access the survey by clicking here.