I'm not sure I can demarcate an activity called "reading" unless it includes so much that it is a redundent category. Even if I ignore the reading I do for work, I've normally got something nearby to read: newspapers, blog posts, magazine articles, chapters of books, whole books. I read some on my phone, a lot on my laptop or printed from the web, and some in actual old fashioned books.
Also, I'm not sure how to disentangle a lot of this reading from socialising as so much [mainly online but also offline] socialising is driven by text and texts. This didn't seems important in the past when books or magazines were the unit of exchange, but now I get sent articles all the time and, thanks to google sharing, delicious and the blogs I have in common with friends, shared texts are now part of conversation.
As a result, I think people read more often and more widely than in the past, and they do so in all sorts of different ways which don't seem to have much in common. I imagine that reading a trashy celeb auto-biog would feel like a long OK magzine. A thriller seems to have more in common with a film. And reading a proper history book is slow, reviewing, discursive, note taking process - which perhaps has more in common with a serious blog.
The fact that someone's reading in a particular format doesn't tell you very much. You need to know what they reading and the rhythms they're reading at.
I'll think more about this later.
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