Something extraordinary happened after Eliana Litos received an e-reader for Hanukkah.

“Some weeks I completely forgot about TV,” said Eliana, 11. “I went two weeks with only watching one show, or no shows at all. I was just reading every day.”

At HarperCollins, e-books made up 25 percent of all young-adult sales in January, up from about 6 percent a year before .

In their infancy e-readers were adopted by an older generation that valued the devices for their convenience, portability and ability to enlarge text . Appetite for e-book editions of best sellers and adult genre fiction has seemed almost bottomless.

But now that e-readers are cheaper and more plentiful, they have gone mass market, reaching consumers across age and demographic groups, and enticing the younger generation to pick them up for the first time.

“The kids have taken over the ereaders,” said Rita Threadgill of Harrison, New York, whose 11-yearold daughter requested a Kindle for Christmas.

In 2010 young-adult e-books made up about 6 percent of total digital sales for titles published by St. Martin’s Press, but so far in 2011, the number is up to 20 percent, a spokeswoman said.

Digital sales have typically represented only a fraction of sales of middle- grade and young-adult books, a phenomenon usually explained partly by the observation that e-readers were too expensive for children and teenagers.

That scene may be slowly replaced by pre-teens and teenagers clustered in groups and reading their Nooks or Kindles together, wirelessly downloading new titles with the push of a button.

Some teachers have been encouraging, too, telling their students that they are allowed to bring e-readers to school for leisure reading during homeroom and English class, for example.

“I didn’t buy it until I knew that the teachers in middle school were allowing kids to read their books on their e-readers,” said Amy Mauer-Litos, Eliana’s mother .

Some younger readers have been exploring the classics, thanks to the availability of older e-books that are in the public domain - and downloadable free.

After receiving a Sony Reader from her grandparents for Christmas, Mia Garcia, a 12-year-old from Touchet, Washington, downloaded “Little Women,” the 19th-century novel by Louisa May Alcott.

“It made me cry,” Mia said. Eryn Garcia, her mother, said the family used the library - stocked with more than 3,000 e-books - to download titles free - sparing her the usual chore of “lugging around 40 pounds of books.”

“There’s something I’m not sure is entirely replaceable about having a stack of inviting books, just waiting for your kids to grab,” Ms. Garcia said.

“But I’m an avid believer that you need to find what excites your child about reading. So I’m all for it.”


By JULIE BOSMAN