“We’re hoping they will grow the number of people who will read.”

Sales of e-readers surged during the Christmas holiday season, according to a Pew Research Center report, which showed that the number of adults in the United States who owned tablets and e-readers nearly doubled from mid-December to early January.

But there are signs that publishers are cooling on tablets for e-reading. A recent survey by Forrester Research showed that 31 percent of publishers believed iPads and similar tablets were the ideal e-reading platform; one year ago, 46 percent thought so.

“The tablet is like a temptress,” said James McQuivey, the Forrester Research analyst who led the survey. “It’s constantly saying, ‘You could be on YouTube now.’ Or it’s sending constant alerts that pop up, saying you just got an e-mail. Reading itself is trying to compete.”

Indeed, the basic menu for the Kindle Fire offers links to video, apps, the Web, music, newsstand and books, effectively making books (once Amazon’s stock in trade) just another menu option. So too with the multipurpose iPad, which Allison Kutz, a 21-year-old senior at Elon University in North Carolina, bought in 2010. She says her reading experience has not been the same since.

She is constantly fending off the urge to check other media, making it tough to finish books. For example, in late September 2010, she bought “Breaking Night,” a memoir about a homeless girl turned Harvard student. Ms. Kutz said the only time she was able to focus on it was on an airplane because there was no Internet access.

“I’ve tried to sit down and read it in Starbucks or the apartment, but I end up on Facebook or Googling something she said, and then the next thing you know I’ve been surfing for 25 minutes,” Ms. Kutz said.

The issue of changing reader habits has been widely discussed by executives at Amazon, maker of the Kindle and Kindle Fire. Russ Grandinetti, the vice president for Kindle content, said one reason that the original Kindle, introduced in 2007 for $399, was not a multipurpose device was precisely so that people could immerse themselves without interruption.