During the fieldwork cycle, we write quick summaries of each interview session and send these immediately to our clients so they can start to circulate stories. At this point in the process we strive to stay descriptive; our goal is just to get stories about the people we’re meeting out to the extended team (us, our direct clients, and their stakeholders).

Our interview with Julie (not her real name) was the last session in the fieldwork for this project.

Julie and her housemate have an amazing library in their San Leandro home, with three walls of alphabetized floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. With the bookshelves and quiet ambiance of the space, being in this part of their home feels just like being a library.

The whole downstairs of their house has been optimized for reading; they have great lighting, and comfortable sofas big enough for two people to stretch out on simultaneously.

Of the six people we met, Julie was the person who most seemed to have integrated printed book and Kindle reading. For Julie, reading a book and reading on the Kindle are both equally positive experiences; in fact, she will sometimes go back and forth between a printed book and the Kindle version of the same book, depending on whether she is at home, traveling, etc.

While some of the people we met described the Kindle as less-than-satisfying compared to a printed book, Julie has a long history of reading on electronic devices, and finds the Kindle a big step forward.

In the following clip, Julie talks about how her electronic reading has evolved, from her first Palm Pilot up to her current Kindle 2:

During the fieldwork cycle, we write quick summaries of each interview session and send these immediately to our clients so they can start to circulate stories. At this point in the process we strive to stay descriptive; our goal is just to get stories about the people we’re meeting out to the extended team (us, our direct clients, and their stakeholders).

Jeff (not his real name) is in the midst of a big remodeling project at home so we met with him in his Silicon Valley office. He was the second Kindle user we saw in our fieldwork, and had a lot of positive things to say about reading on the device.

Jeff says that he’s not a “flipper” but does tend to be reading 3-4 books at a time, as well as newspapers and blogs. These various pieces of content require differing levels of attention and serve different moods, and Jeff likes that on the Kindle he can have all of this material at his fingertips, especially when he’s doing a lot of traveling.

Jeff uses his Kindle for not only for personal reading but for work as well, and sometimes publishes documents he needs to read to the Kindle. He and his team have also experimented with using the Kindle as a platform for delivering presentations.

Demonstrating a business presentation on the Kindle

Jeff says one of the things he feels Amazon has done really well is to develop the “device ecosystem.” Between his job, the remodel, and a household that includes 4 kids and several dogs, cats, and chickens, Jeff is extremely busy, and he likes the ease and efficiency of the book-buying experience the Kindle supports.

In the following clip, Jeff tells some quick stories about using his Kindle to buy reading materials:

During the fieldwork cycle, we write quick summaries of each interview session and send these immediately to our clients so they can start to circulate stories. At this point in the process we strive to stay descriptive; our goal is just to get stories about the people we’re meeting out to the extended team (us, our direct clients, and their stakeholders).

Chris (not his real name) is a software engineer in his early thirties. He lives in an apartment in Mountain View with his wife and their small dog. They moved here a couple of months ago, after returning from an extended stay in Europe.

When they left the US for Europe, the couple got rid of many of their possessions, including their books. Now that they’ve settled in again, Chris says he’s still trying to keep from accumulating too much stuff, and has been buying fewer books and using the library more.

Chris says he used to focus more than he does now on finishing books as a form of accomplishment. He described how he used to line up the books he had finished in a row, so he could see a physical record of his reading.

Chris reads a lot of technical books. Since he uses many of these as reference materials, often annotating and bookmarking them, he generally finds it useful to own them in print, rather than borrowing them from the library or using PDF versions.

One of Chris’ bookmarked reference books

Chris showed us the various ways he navigates through printed books, including “flipping” and going back and forth between non-sequential pages.

In the following clip, he talks about the flexible navigation afforded by printed books:

During the fieldwork cycle, we write quick summaries of each interview session and send these immediately to our clients so they can start to circulate stories. At this point in the process we strive to stay descriptive; our goal is just to get stories about the people we’re meeting out to the extended team (us, our direct clients, and their stakeholders).

Peter (not his real name), the first Kindle user we’ve interviewed, works in web production. When describing himself, he says,”I like gadgets.”

We met with him at his home in Vallejo. He describes doing several types of reading: instructional reading to expand his knowledge about topics of interest like photography, fiction as a “form of engagement with a piece of art,” and non-fiction as a way to vicariously experience other places and lifestyles.

Peter’s had his Kindle for a couple of years. He says when he first got it (as a gift from his partner), it “got him” buying books right away, and he used it almost exclusively for around a year.

He says serious limitations of the Kindle are that you can’t have two books open at once (if you’re using a reference book, etc.), that it is unable to “capture” the act of flipping through a book looking for a passage, and that it still doesn’t create the same quality of experience as “the whiteness of paper” and crisp black text.

When I ask Peter if he has any emotions about his Kindle, he calls it “neutral.”

The biggest frustration for Peter is that he can’t share Kindle books.

In the clip below, Peter tells the story of how this desire to share led him back to printed books:

During the fieldwork cycle, we write quick summaries of each interview session and send these immediately to our clients so they can start to circulate stories. At this point in the process we strive to stay descriptive; our goal is just to get stories about the people we’re meeting out to the extended team (us, our direct clients, and their stakeholders).

Erica (not her real name) is 28 and lives by herself in an apartment in San Francisco. She described growing up without a lot of money but in a house where there were “walls of bookshelves.” When she and her Mom had free days, they would visit different libraries, and Erica still remembers physical details from some of these places.

She had been planning to open a cookbook store, until the recent economic slump. She’s working now as an office manager at a software startup and regrouping.

Erica talked about buying certain books just because she likes them as objects: “I love books. I almost like books more than reading.”

She says that lately she’s really been noticing how “the computer lifestyle has seeped in so deeply,” which she feels is making her attention span shorter. She says that on the computer, “everything is fast,” and that books are a way to “unplug” and slow down.

Erica has different types of books for different weather, moods, and reading situations. On public transit, she reads books that can be easily stopped and started; something she says is difficult to do with complex works.

In the clip below, Erica talks about how she organizes her bookshelf by feeling:

During the fieldwork cycle, we write quick summaries of each interview session and send these immediately to our clients so they can start to circulate stories. At this point in the process we strive to stay descriptive; our goal is just to get stories about the people we’re meeting out to the extended team (us, our direct clients, and their stakeholders).

Here is the first of these highlights for Reading Ahead.

We met with Tracy

(not her real name) and her two sons at their home in a suburb of Santa Cruz. Tracy is a stay-at-home mom and part-time massage therapist, and is going back to school in the fall to get an MA in Occupational Therapy.

Reading is a big part of her family’s life. She reads every night with her sons (including a two-hour Harry Potter session the night before), and told us she does different voices for each character in the stories.

Reading has always been important to Tracy, and she showed us several books from her own childhood that she keeps on her shelves–including one that her father had when he was a child. She also talked about sharing book recommendations with her Mom and her friends.

Childhood books

In addition to a regular set of reading rituals with the kids, Tracy reads on her own, which she describes as: “My way of getting completely unplugged.”

Tracy and her boys make a weekly trip to the library, which usually culminates in a big spread of books on the living room floor.

Back from the library

I asked them to show us what this is like. Watching the boys comb through the pile to choose a book, I was struck by how physical their interaction with the books was.

There was also an interesting family moment where I asked about a book Tracy mentioned (Tacky, a children’s story about an iconoclastic penguin), and all three spontaneously recited the names of Tacky’s friends in perfect unison.

Here’s a short clip from that part of the interview:

Starting any project means we inevitably come across any number of articles that pertain to the topic or the themes that emerge from the research and synthesis.

Sometimes we’ll dedicate some time at the beginning to collect articles and summarize ’em, but more often we’ll just do a quick scan and opportunistically look for issues to inform our recruiting and planning for fieldwork.

Here’s what we’re reading now (and we’ll do a part 2 if and when we find more articles of interest):

• Kindle and the Future of Reading – Nicholson Baker in the New Yorker
  
• NPR Books: July 7, 2008 – “A challenge for amazon’s Kindle e-reader: how does it stand up to a visit to a pool?”
• Hotels Offering eBooks as Amenities – jk OnTheRun (also this from the same site)
• Amazon Taps Its Inner Apple – Adam L. Penenberg in Fast Company
  
• Barnes & Noble unveils largest ebookstore
• Some Thoughts on the Anthology – A Working Library
  

  Among the many complaints made about the shift from reading on paper to reading on screen, perhaps the most common-and most difficult to counter-is that we are moving from a medium that requires concentration to one that sows distraction into every syllable. This complaint assumes that the act of flitting from one reading to the next is necessarily inferior; but what if that were not always the case?

• Possible ou probable? – Video of a future scenario for the book itself
• Amazon’s Orwellian deletion of Kindle books- Boing Boing
• Universities Turn to Kindle Sometimes To Save Paper – NYT Green Inc. blog
• Jeff Bezos on NPR’s On Point
• NPR Books: June 26, 2008 – “Chinese fiction writers are using the Internet as a way to reach and entertain their readership”
• Comparison of eBook devices (also here)
• Devices from Wikipedia
  

  Prominent examples include:
  * Plastic Logic (2010)[8]
  * txtr by the German start-up txtr (to be presented in the Oct 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair)[9][10]
  * Cybook Opus by Bookeen (August 2009)
  * Readius foldable eBook reader by Polymer Vision (Will never release due to bankrupt)[11]
  * COOL-ER ereader by Interread (2009)
  * Digital Reader 1000 SW by iRex (2009)
  * Kindle 2 by Amazon (2009)
  * Sony Reader PRS-700 by Sony (2009)
  * Digital Reader 1000 by iRex (2008)
  * Sony Reader PRS-505 by Sony (2007/8)
  * Kindle by Amazon (2007)
  * Cybook Gen3 by Bookeen (2007)
  * Hanlin eReader by Jinke (distributed as “Lbook” in Estonia, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine as “BeBook” in Europe; also distributed by Pixelar) (2007)
  * Wattpad (2006) for Mobile Java devices and other mobile phones
  * Sony Reader PRS-500 by Sony (2006)
  * iLiad by iRex (2006)
  * Librié by Sony (2004)

• iPhone as eReader – Lexcycle
  

  Lexcycle today announced that more than 2 million users have downloaded Stanza, the popular electronic book reader application for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch, since it was launched one year ago. Stanza’s award-winning reading experience, which features customizable formatting, searching, library management and over-the-air book downloads on demand, has led to more than 12 million book downloads.
  These milestones highlight that many people are quite comfortable reading full length books via Stanza on their iPhones and iPod touch.

• Is the iPhone the Ultimate eBook Reader? – ReadWriteWeb
• Why Apple’s iTouch Tablet Will Become Its Flagship Product – Seeking Alpha

People always ask us, “how do you find the people for your projects?”

Figuring out how to identify appropriate people to interview for a project is all-important. For Reading Ahead, we know we need people who are active readers. What constitutes an “active reader?” We’re defining it as people who read books at least three times a week, in multiple locations. We want people who are engaged in the behavior at a level where they will have lots of experiences from which to draw. We also know that we want to look at how people’s behavior changes/doesn’t change/is supported by/is influenced when reading books in print vs. reading eBooks using a device.

When we have established the criteria for participating in the research, we typically use a specialized recruiting company to find people. We write a screener, which has a series of specific questions to identify people who meet our criteria.

Screener excerpt, Reading Ahead project, 2009

Finding the right people can be quite complex, and for some projects, we’ve written screeners that are more than 10 pages long. If we’re looking for people who do activities X and Y, in locations 1, 2, and 3, but have never done activity Z-well, you get the idea!

In this project, the criteria are simpler, and we’ll be doing our own recruiting. In fact, if you’re in the Bay Area and an avid reader or Kindle user, let us know and maybe we can talk with you!

Update: We put together a representative screener that is formal enough to be given to a recruiting firm, even though we aren’t doing that for Reading Ahead. You can download it here.

We’re very excited here at Portigal Consulting to announce the start of a new self-funded project–Reading Ahead.

In Reading Ahead, we’ll be exploring the evolution of reading and books from a consumer perspective–what it means to be a reader, how artifacts from traditional books to devices like Amazon’s Kindle affect the experience, and what the future might hold for readers, product developers, and beyond.

Over the course of the project, we’ll be blogging both about how we work and what we see and learn.

Steve Portigal (left) and Dan Soltzberg, project kickoff, July 27, 2009

Understanding our client
One of the first steps in any project is figuring out what the project is really about. So the first piece of research we do is often focused on our client.

As we work with our clients to establish the scope and approach of a project, we also interview key stakeholders in their organization to better understand what they know and what they need to know. (This doesn’t always map to what they think they know and what they think they need to know, and it’s important to suss out the differences.) These interviews help us understand the dynamics of the team and the organizational culture.

In this case, we’re our own client, so we sat down and asked each other some fundamental questions

• What is it we want to know that we don’t know now?
  
• What are we going to do with what we learn?
  
• What are the people, places, things, behaviors, etc. that we think we want to focus on.
  
• How broadly or tightly do we want to draw the scope of the exploration (at least at the outset-this can change as the project moves forward). In this case, to what extent might we want to be looking at bigger categories like content, entertainment, free time?

The way we answer these project definition questions will have a huge affect on how the work unfolds. As in most projects, we’ll be looking for the sweet spot that is constrained enough to give the project a clear focus but open enough to leave room for the unexpected.

• Percival Everett's short story, “The Appropriation of Cultures” – This is the second story in this podcast and is an entertaining and powerful piece of fiction about the meaning of symbols and the power that we might seize to change that meaning. Culture jamming as narrative device, in other words.
• Ethnography is not an in-home interview – Grant McCracken considers the emerging finger-pointing as Tesco doesn't do as well in the US as they had hoped. Was research (or rather, poor research) to blame? I share his concern about people going through the motions and claiming they've done the research. A prospective client asked us the other day why they would hire us as opposed to simply borrowing a video camera from his brother and dropping into some of their target offices. It's an important question because it reveals a common mindset. My short answer was that they should definitely do that, but that the expertise we are bringing includes (but is not limited to) the ability to plan and execute those interviews so you really do get to something new, and the process for analyzing and synthesizing that data so that we can identify what it means to them and what the opportunities are. Perhaps, as McCracken suggests, Tesco failed to do just that.
• Standing/adjustable height work surfaces, long available in workplaces, are being tried out – with seeming success – in schools – Teachers in Minnesota and Wisconsin say they know from experience that the desks help give children the flexibility they need to expend energy and, at the same time, focus better on their work rather than focusing on how to keep still.
  …
  “We’re talking about furniture here,” she said, “plain old furniture. If it’s that simple, if it turns out to have the positive impacts everyone hopes for, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?”