Why NYC Subway Riders Still Read Books

    

Posted: 08/14/2013 - HuffPost Books  - By Kayla Bibeau                                                     

                                             

I feel like with e-books, you often just get a meal on the same white plate as all the other meals. But a nice hardcover is like having a place setting, having dinnerware selected to suit the food. The story is still the main thing you're there for but the choices around it -- the paper stock, the way the book is typeset, the selection of fonts -- they add their own subtle flavors to the experience of that story.

                                                                                - Web Designer Jack Cheng

Did you know the NYC subway goes all the way to Chicago? And it has more stations than any other system in the world -- a total of 468.  The Big Apple depends on its public transportation.  In 2012, it carried over a billion riders, according to Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which serves a population of 15.1 million people in New York City, Long Island, southeastern New York State and Connecticut.
A typical subway experience can be an adventure: riders sitting in more than one seat, straphangers bobbing to their music, the crazies, the snoozers, the gamers and the readers. Some readers prefer their handheld devices, holding on to a pole with one hand and their tablet with the other. But many still crack open their books to escape into another world.
From the birth of the Kindle in 2007, e-book sales have skyrocketed and even topped print sales last year. Today, roughly one in three adults owns one.
But is it a battle of handheld e-books vs. printed paper or simply a fight for share of attention? Are e-books the real winners or are paper-and-ink books losing ground to a slew of cheap or free portable entertainment available on one device?

Roger Santos, a NYC native and twenty-three-year-old business student, is a proponent of paper and ink. Although admittedly a huge "tech person," Santos chooses to do some things the old-fashioned way. "I prefer to be as disconnected as I can from certain things as we're always involved with technology in other ways," said Santos.

Mason Turcotte, a 28-year-old theology student from New York, thinks that "technology has overwhelmed our attention." He believes we are dividing our time between too many things and now print may become a casualty in the battle between pixels and ink. "We're losing touch with what's important and instead we're plugging in with machines."

Printed books have a lasting value. Your copy is unique and nostalgic; the words have been massively replicated but only one contains your childhood scribbles or the smell of grandma's house within the pages. The Bible that Turcotte owns contains many highlighted passages and many pages marked with stars, underlines, hearts, connections, page references, comments and interpretations scribbled in by hand. Of the 6 billion Bibles printed in the world, Turcotte's is one of a kind.
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