The UK press is all a flutter with the news that have of UK people prefer reading books and watching TV on their iPads. This will be news to the colossal numbers of people in Blighty who do not even own an iPad, but the silly season story made its way into the very serious Daily Telegraph newspaper so it must be true.

The yarn was based on “research”, which was carried out by Cooper Murphy Webb which is an advertising company and has been widely reported in the Apple press over the weekend. If you believe the research, Brits are abandoning books and print for the iPad. More than 41 per cent said that their ‘preferred method of reading books’ was via an iPad, beating print, which was preferred by 36 per cent of those polled.

However the study of UK people was based on a population of 1,000 UK iPad owners. Of them 43 per cent use the device for more than 10 hours a week and that the majority of users rarely took the iPad outside of the home. Only five per cent of those questioned, ‘always’ left home with their iPads, whereas 35 per cent said that they ‘rarely’ took the device out with them.

So what we have here is a headline which claims that 41 per cent of people prefer reading on their iPads when it is only 41 per cent of iPad users.