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There are four times more people reading e-books on a typical day now than was the case less than two years ago

E-book reading happens across an array of devices, including smartphones.

In a head-to-head competition, people prefer e-books to printed books when they want speedy access and portability, but print wins out when people are reading to children and sharing books with others

The culture of “why not this too?” keeps the giant growing and constantly changing. 

The plain lower-case logo looks almost sorry to bother you. Tiffani Jones Brown, who oversees the writing of much of the text on the site, says that its personality must be nothing more than “simple, human, clear and consistent”. The music app is called…Music. The photos app is called Photos. The message service is called Messages. Everything on the site is to be written so that an 11-year-old can read it—even though Facebook likes its users to be at least 13.

This highlights a key feature of Facebook: it is the anti-Apple. Apple’s products are designed down to their molecules so that you never forget who made them. The colours, fonts and distinctive shapes give Apple an ever-present personality. This reflects the top-down, “we know best” culture cultivated for decades by the brilliant authoritarian Steve Jobs. Facebook could not be more different. “‘Authority’ is just not a word here,” Bosworth says with a laugh. “It’s not a thing we use.”

“The things people complain about in real life, it’s like they rediscovered them on Facebook. It’s like gossip never existed before, as if your history never followed you around before. I’m not saying there’s not some differences—but these aren’t Facebook problems, they’re just fundamentally human problems.”

Even if Facebook should fall—as Friendster and MySpace rose and fell—its reverberations will be lasting. Google made the internet navigable. Apple made it portable, through intuitive, brilliant devices. Now Facebook has made it social, raising a generation that will never again expect things to be otherwise.

Facebook has not replaced social life. It has tightened the social fabric, in a way that fits many people, and which many just as clearly chafe against. The social ills ascribed to it are, by and large, not new. Once people suffered from hysteria and melancholy; in the modern age, they have anxiety and depression. Once they suffered gossiping and bullying; now it’s “Facebook official” drama and cyber-bullying. Once they could envy the greener grass on their neighbour’s side; now it’s “Facebook anxiety” about his (or, more likely, her) online photos. Once they wondered if their social lives were fulfilling enough; now they suffer FOMO—fear of missing out—and get to see all the pictures from the party they weren’t invited to. New labels for old problems. But these problems are larger-looming and becoming ever-present for the mill

ions who can’t get enough of their social networks