Last night my three-legged cat Flannery played with my roommate’s $800 iPad. In case you’re confused, the game is called “Game for Cats” and the premise is: a hot-pink laser dot darts around the screen and when the cat successfully paws it, the game congratulates the cat with an irritating noise that sounds like an arcade ping. The cat also receives points.
It turns out that my cat isn’t that much different from most people in this country. According to a national survey by Simba’s Trade E-Book Publishing, forty per cent of iPad owners have not used the iPad to read or buy a book. I called Michael Norris, the survey’s senior analyst, and asked him what people are using their iPads for. That question wasn’t in this particular survey, he said. This survey focused on e-books. He asked two thousand people questions such as: “Do you read e-books?” “Where do you buy your e-books?” “How many e-books have you bought in the past year?” and “What devices have you used to read and access an e-book?” The Nook was on there, as were the Kindle, the Sony devices, and others.
“The thing that was most interesting to me,” Norris said, “is a few weeks after adding that last question, I started to notice iPads in the wild, on Metro North, and every single iPad that I saw somebody was doing something other than reading on it.”
So he added one more question, “Do you own an iPad?” Once the results came in, he and his research team were able to cross tabulate the responses and figure out who among the people who owned an iPad also read e-books. The outcome? Just as he’d observed: not many.
“There are so many thousands of applications that it’s easier for books to get accessed,” he said, “but also easier for them to get overlooked. This is part of why we’re always going to have print books,” he assured me. “The activity of reading a book demands a lot more from a person than a few mindless minutes of a game like ‘Angry Birds.’”
I played “Angry Birds” for a few mindless minutes and got to thinking: could there be something even more mindless? Might there be a human equivalent of “Game for Cats”? I borrowed my roommate’s iPad and within minutes found a game called “Chase the Dot Pro.” As the title suggests, you chase dots with your finger. Surely, there must be something as fun as “Game for Cats” but not as mindless. I wanted something literary, something like (dare I say it?) a book. I wanted sound effects! Animation! Stuff to reward me for reading!
I’m happy to report that I came across 3D Classic Literature. The app simulates what it’s like to read an actual book. The electronic pages look like real pages as they turn. Much like “Game for Cats,” 3D Classic Literature rewards users for accomplishing a task: after you read a page and turn it, you’re congratulated with a noise that sounds like a real page being turned.
I have to say, “Game for Cats” and 3D Classic Literature are both pretty neat, but in my metaphorical book, real books beat them both. Norris agrees.
“I definitely see the appeal of e-books for some people,” he said, especially for frequent commuters and travelers, “but the value of print just can’t be denied. You don’t have a charger to misplace, you know it will always work when you open it, and you can throw it across a room if you don’t like the ending.”
