The tactile pleasure of worn pages between your fingers is hard to replace. But when it comes to encouraging people to embrace the written word, e-readers trump their physical counterparts.
According to the infographic below, people who own e-book devices say they read more than people who don't, at a rate of 24 books per year to 15. Education, escape, relaxation and entertainment rank as people's main motivations to plow through books -- proving that, whether electronically or via dead tree, reading remains a popular pastime.
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E-readers are also rising in popularity, signaling that it may not be impossible to imagine a world without traditional books sometime in the not-so-distant future.
Before you scoff, consider this: From December 2011 to January 2012, e-reader ownership nearly doubled, from 10 percent to 19 percent, among American adults. And that stunning surge in just one month's time doesn't even account for tablets or other mobile electronic devices people use to read books and longform content. Worldwide, meanwhile, e-reader sales rose by nearly 3 million between 2010 and 2011.
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It's also interesting to look at the relationship between actual e-book consumption and ownership of a device that enables users to read books electronically. According to one study, 29% of American adults own a personal e-book device, tablets included. But just 21% of adults had actually read an e-book in the past year as of February 2012.
All this information and more comes to us from the online education portal Schools.com, which surveyed a handful of sources from around the web to produce the following infographic. Check it out below, then let us know in the comments -- do you think traditional books will ever die out?
This story originally published on Mashable here.