E-readers spell the end of the line for a nosy peek over a shoulder

ONE OF THE unforeseen consequences of the rise of the e-reader is the way it robs you of the opportunity to snoop on other people’s reading habits, to spot the trends, to get recommendations by osmosis.

Stand in a train carriage dotted with the covers of books and you can trace the creep of the megasellers. Five years ago, you couldn't go two stops without seeing a copy of The Da Vinci Code. Next it was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; now it's One Day.You'll see someone stuck into a book you've previously devoured, and you might want to ask whether they are enjoying it, tell them not to bother going on or give in to the ungenerous urge to mutter something as you squeeze past them at your stop. "Has he died yet? No? Oops. Never mind."

You can see the gender stereotypes made real: men read nonfiction, women read novels, but everyone reads crime novels with nearly identical covers.

And a passenger's reading choice allows you to spin off into biographical fantasy: is that Rough Guide to Indiafor a solo trip? If they are lacking confidence, why are they reading 20 Steps to a More Confident Youin a public place?

To a lesser degree, you can play this game with newspaper readers. I occasionally keep half an eye on people as they read The Irish Times: what pages they stop at; what section they held on to for a week; why they savoured almost the entire Weekend Review, turned to the back page, glanced at the top of it and immediately put it down. (Not that I notice.)

E-readers offer none of this encroachment of others’ psychic space. You can’t tell one grey outer casing from the next or even identify the book by each page heading. The owner might be wrapped in a great adventure, but you are locked out of it. The words might be delicious, but to the outsider it’s just grey goo.

Increasingly, this is the experience. Amazon doesn’t release detailed sales figures – in fact, Amazon doesn’t release much of anything other than products – but using the very mobile library that is the train as a rough sample, in Ireland the e-reader’s tipping point is near. It’s in part because among the further surprises of the device is in who is using it: the people you might expect to save the paper book are the ones abandoning it.

With the iPad it’s easier to identify the most likely owner: male, 30s or thereabouts, obvious early-adopter types pawing their new toy. But the Kindle is from a broader pool, and has a clear appeal among older people, lifelong readers, guzzlers of print. The early adopters are, in fact, the late adopters.

This isn’t a new observation. As far back as 2009 (primordial times for the e-reader), US commentators and researchers were noting its particular success with people over 50. Yes, it was being sold to the middle-class, educated market, but the age thing was a genuine twist. Anecdotally too, you hear of members of the “print generation” being initially resistant to the e-reader. Until they get one. Then they become enthusiasts. There may be a growing nostalgia for the bookshops, and fear of their demise, but Amazon’s aggression isn’t killing them: its customers are proving more than adequate assassins for hire.

This is a big month for Amazon. On Tuesday, it starts shipping the Amazon Fire tablet, but only to the US, so that we will once again get to watch another nation unwrap some new techno goodie, play with it, gripe about it and generally have fun with it.

Yet Amazon’s ambition has been as obvious in less-heralded innovations. Its Amazon Prime premium-service customers are being offered some free books through a lending service (many publishers are not amused).

Meanwhile, Amazon now has half a dozen publishing imprints of its own, although it’s telling that it still publishes some of these as paperbacks.

And it continues to drop Kindle prices, in keeping with the intriguing theory that it will soon be giving Kindles to customers who sign up to Prime, its movie service or some other variation of that business model. It might sound unlikely, but how many of us have high-end mobile phones that came “free” with our plan?

Ushered in by its position as a gift parents buy for their offspring, and offspring buy for their parents, the e-reader will have its Irish watershed this Christmas. Many will emerge into the new year enmeshed within Amazon’s ecosystem, however healthy that can ultimately be.

Meanwhile, in the train carriage, there will soon be only one monotone cover.