I’m sorry, but I’m just not reading books on a phone. Of course, what’s true for me may not be so for the broader world.

From Ellis Hamburger’s Verge interview with Willem Van Lancker, co-founder of the Oyster book app:

Question:

Where are people reading more, tablets, phones, or on the web?

Willem Van Lancker:

We’ve always been really big believers that the device of the future for books is the phone. That’s the first thing we went to publishers with when we started talking about the differentiation of Oyster, that we can provide the best possible mobile experience.

It’s hard to get the data on this with Android, because, what is a tablet? But between iPhone and iPad, it’s a 50 / 50 split. It might even be higher on the phone in recent months over the iPad. This is an app that people use on their phone constantly, and we see the actual activity spiking during the week at lunchtime, and through the evening and peaks around midnight, and on the weekends it’s pretty sustained. Unlike a lot of products, our biggest days are Saturdays and Sundays, but when we added the web reader, you see it spiking on weekdays because people are reading during work.

We thought about making a button you could hit that would make Oyster look like Microsoft Word like they do for March Madness. It would be funny to bring that to books.

Question:

Why did your gut tell you that people are going to be reading on phones in the future?

Willem Van Lancker:

It was my own behavior. Even when I’m in bed at night, I have an iPad mini with Retina and I still use my phone. And I have an iPhone 6 now, which is even better.•