The large majority of reading that I have been doing over the past couple of years has been done online via blogs.
Online content today is essentially advertising with the aim of it being to draw people in and have them perform a desired task such as view and/or click on a banner ad, sign up to a mailing list or follow a call to action. Performing almost any activity online means being distracted in a multitude of ways with reading online being one of the most difficult to perform without losing focus before reaching the end of an article.
I recently read the Kindle version of Ryan Holiday’s “Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising” and forgot what a pleasurable experience being able to concentrate on the topic in hand is without being distracted by mailing list sign up boxes inline and to the side of the of what I want to read.
How would you compare the experience of reading online with a book?