Book lovers have a message for e-book makers: you can have my paperback when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

We reported yesterday on the 2008 Digital Entertainment Survey from the UK, which found that 70 percent of Internet users would stop sharing files if they received notification from their ISP. But tucked in the survey data was another fascinating finding about the strength of consumer attachment to traditional paper books.

According to the research, sponsored by UK media lawyers Wiggin, survey data shows books have the highest "attachment" rating of any leisure media activity. People are more attached to their books than they are to their satellite television, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, social networks, video games, blogs, DVDs, and P2P file-swapping. And it's not like this high rate of affection for the book occurs only among a small group; books came in second only to "listen to the radio" in terms of the number of people who engage in those activities.



I feel nothing for you

That's not great news for the e-book market, and follow-up questions only showed how entrenched paper books are in the public imagination. When the survey asked about people's emotional attachment to paper books, 53 percent of respondents said that they would "never" or would "hate" to stop using them, and another 24 percent said they would be "uncomfortable."

When asked directly about the appeal of e-book readers, 39 percent of the respondents said that the readers were appealing or very appealing, but 61 percent had the opposite reaction.

The survey notes that familiarity with the devices seems to boost their attractiveness to most people, and 17 percent of respondents did say they would almost certainly purchase a reader once they learned about all of its features and benefits. Entertainment Media Research, which authored the study, notes that "the printed book remains one of the highest emotionally attached media we measured, so such innovations are likely to be somewhat slow in catching on in the mainstream."

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