Apple's Steve Jobs, talking to The New York Times about Amazon's Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Which means sixty percent of people in the U.S.--180 million people--are, to some degree, readers. More if you count newspapers, magazines, and the web.

It strikes me as odd that Jobs, the head of a company that is doing very well with a less than 9 percent market share*, doesn't appreciate that.

* UPDATE: Notice how I conflate the size of a market with market share? I think that's called lying with statistics. Still, I think the larger point stands.

Labels: Apple, kindle, reading, Steve Jobs

Please forgive the self-promotion/cross-posting, but I just submitted one of the more interesting Librarything blog posts of late to Digg. Would love it if you'd take a second to go over and digg it, and pass it along to anyone else you know who might be interested:

http://digg.com/software/You_are_what_you_read

As noted in the comments of the LibraryThing blog post, there must be a bunch of similar things that could be done with one's words, or a word cloud. Would love to hear any good ideas. I'm seriously considering wrapping my MacBook in a word cloud.

Labels: Digg, LibraryThing, reading