Reading together as a Leisure Activity: Implications for E-reading

Overview & Synopsis

Reading from devices such as Kindles, Nooks, and tablets (“e-readers”) is an increasingly common practice. A primary reason users purchase e-readers is to read for pleasure, as opposed to reading for work or school purposes. With paper, people sometimes read together from a single book (e.g., reading a bedtime story with a child) – a practice we call partnered reading. This practice, and the goals of e-reading for pleasure more generally, remain underexplored in the HCI literature. This paper contributes findings from a deployment study wherein participants used an e-reader application to read with a partner. These findings (a) provide descriptive accounts of how people use e-readers to read together, and (b) identify opportunities to improve the design of e-readers to support partnered e-reading for pleasure.