The latest study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project chronicles some unsurprising trends: People are reading less print books, more eBooks, and those who own eBook readers or tablets are on the rise. eReaders saw an almost 10 percent growth in ownership this past year, while the number of people who owned tablets grew 15 percent. That makes 33 percent of Americans eBook reader/tablet owners. Read more

Last week, Poynter shared findings from its recent eye-tracking study. Using “eyetracking gear, observation and exit interviews,” Poynter tracked 36 people as they engaged with news stories on an iPad, an article for the study noted.

In order to make sure differences between study participants were apparent, Poynter brought in candidates from two separate age groups: 18-28-year-olds and 45-55-year-olds.

According to Poynter, iPad users in the study fell into one of two categories when they were interacting with a news story:

“People were either intimately involved with the iPad screen while reading during our recent eyetracking study — keeping nearly constant contact while touching, tapping, pinching and swiping to adjust their view — or they carefully arranged a full screen of text before physically detaching as they sat back to read.”

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Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) has released a report in collaboration with The Economist Group that looks at news consumption on mobile devices. The comprehensive study looks at the activities of 9,513 adults on tablets and smart phones, and their feelings about advertisements and paying for news.  Though PEJ has already created its own infographic, they’re asking the public to come up with something better. Read more

A new study from Pew Internet finds that the number of daily Twitter users among adults has doubled since May of last year, even though the overall percentage of Twitter users has only grown 2 percent since that time. The authors of the study attributed the increase to a rise in smartphone usage—smartphone owners are twice as likely as others to use Twitter on a typical day. Young adults have had the largest increase in smartphone usage, which perhaps explains why 18 to 24-year-old Internet users have undergone the largest increase in Twitter usage: about one third of them use Twitter, and those who use it on a daily basis have doubled.

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A new study by MIT, which seeks to understand Twitter’s “contagion process,” has found that news media played a crucial role in the site’s growth. The study tracked development from 2006 to 2009, and also found that more traditional forms of social networking, like geographic closeness, were an important factor in Twitter’s initial diffusion.

The authors of the paper, which is set to appear in the journal PLoS ONE, used Google Insights for Search to track weekly news stories from Google News searches. Spikes in Twitter adoption corresponded with news coverage. One example was Ashton Kutcher’s challenge to CNN to see who could attract 1 million followers first. Kutcher won by half an hour, gaining an invite from Oprah Winfrey who also sent out her very first tweet. As news about Twitter increased, so did its number of users. Read more