Getting Rid of E-mail…

As we’ve said many times, our most successful publishers are promoting their content in more ways than e-mail. Here’s the statistic we repeat all the time because it’s vital: one year ago, 85 percent of all Nxtbooks were read as a result of e-mail. Now, despite readership that’s nearly doubled in the past year, the percentage is just more than 50 percent. People are becoming less and less reliant on e-mail as a way to consume your content.

If you really want to understand why and how people are changing, read this great post from Dave Pollard. Pollard is always ahead of the curve, mind you, but he’s almost always on the correct road.

So, what I’m saying is that if I had no e-mail address (and for that matter, no voicemail box), I’d get along just fine. I’d send and receive lots of spontaneous IMs (including those in Skype, Twitter and Second Life) that sometimes migrate to voice-to-voice conversations. I’d get my exercise at work walking the halls to visit with people, and learn to be a better phone conversationalist. I’d use RSS to create my own personalized newspaper of important things to read, and I’d tweak the sources and filters so the volume was just enough to be comfortably manageable in the time I have available for reading. And I’d go home from work every night with nothing in my work inbox, and to bed at night with nothing in my personal inbox.