E-book sales in the US

Between 2017 and 2023, Americans reading books on tablets and Americans summoning strangers in cars moved in near-perfect opposition, as if the country could do one or the other but not both. The correlation is -0.985, tight enough to suggest a kind of civic trade agreement nobody signed. One imagines the phone itself arbitrating, allotting each evening to either Kindle or Lyft.

E-book sales in the US drifted down from around $2.0 billion in 2017 to about $1.1 billion by 2023, partly as audiobooks ate into the digital reading category and partly as print quietly held steady. Combined Uber and Lyft rides, meanwhile, climbed from roughly 2.6 billion in 2017 to over 6 billion by 2023, with a steep pandemic trough in 2020 followed by aggressive recovery. Both trends are expressions of how the same phone is used: as rideshare became more convenient and reading migrated to audio and social, the digital book lost shelf space on the home screen. The inverse is not a trade-off; it is a reallocation within a single device.

The phone is the real protagonist of both curves, quietly deciding where attention goes on any given evening. One habit shrank, another expanded, and the screen remained the same size throughout. We are the data, and we are getting a ride home.