I’m not quite sure who Read it Later is. They have a fancy website that is very poor at explaining what they do, but they have a fascinating article on how mobile is affecting how we read.
According to the site the dataset for the article is: One of the world’s largest digital reading platforms, RIL’s 3M registered users have saved over 100 million articles and read on every major web and mobile platform.
And here’s a snippet (blockquotes omitted):
iPhone Users
This is where it gets interesting. You’ll note four major spikes when most of the reading on an iPhone is done:
- 6am – Early morning, breakfast
- 9am – The morning commute, start of the work day
- 5pm – 6pm – End of the work day and the commute home
- 8pm – 10pm – Couch time, prime time, bed time
In reality, this really is a graph of whitespace time. Whitespace is the time between A and B. It’s the time on the subway or bus. It’s the time standing in line. It’s a spare moment.
It is during these moments between tasks and locations that people reach for their phone. These are perfect times to knock an item or two off of your reading list. By saving content for later, readers are able to consume content during the voids in their day without interrupting the day’s normal flow.
This is an excellent ‘add on’ for web browsers that allow you to save web pages for reading later.
Their article tries to show the difference between the times people who use the add on encounter the web pages and save them for later reading – as against the time of day that they actually revisit and read them. The differing characteristics of device users is quite fascinating.