Why Baby Boomers Love the Kindle—and Millennials Don’t

livemint.com:

My DAD AND I agree on most things: Bloody Marys are vastly superior to mimosas. On YouTube, “Yoga with Kassandra" beats “Yoga with Adriene." The Yankees over…is there even a question? (This season, maybe.) But we can’t seem to settle one debate: Are e-readers superior to physical books? I, a millennial, can’t get enough of hard copies, while my baby boomer dad is enamored with his Kindle Paperwhite (from $140), which uses a unique no-glare lighting system to replicate a traditional reading experience more closely than a phone or tablet. It’s tough to operate at first, he said, but you soon get the hang of it.

He also likes that it lets him control the font and its size, as well as brightness. “And you can stop wherever you want—you don’t have to put a bookmark in it—and it’ll take you back there." I was surprised to learn that many in his generation seem to be on the same page. Amazon says more than one-third of Kindle customers are 55 or older.

Vicki Strull, a brand strategist and packaging designer in Atlanta in her early 50s, is a Kindle evangelist. She initially bought hers in 2012, as a gift for her middle-school-aged children. After the device had collected dust for two years, Strull brought it to the beach on a whim.

She was hooked, especially since the Kindle’s waterproof “pages" wouldn’t disintegrate if her soggy kids dripped on them. Once Strull became a Kindle convert, she purchased one for her parents, now in their mid-eighties, who she says love it and heavily rely on it. “When my mother wakes up in the middle of the night, she uses her e-reader," Strull said.

Since it lights itself, the Kindle doesn’t disturb her father’s sleep. Her kids don’t understand. “To this day," she said, her now-high school- and