Warning: Think Twice Before Reading On The Toilet With Your iPad Or eReader

There’s nothing new about taking a newspaper, magazine or even a book into the bathroom while you do your…uh…business. Usually the bathroom is the one place people can get a little peace and quiet, making it ideal for reading.

Now we live in an age of iPads and eReaders. So it naturally follows that people will take their shiny new electronics into the bathroom to read as well.

While I’ve sometimes wondered about how sanitary it is taking reading material in the bathroom, I’ve never wondered if taking an iPad (for example) would be any different.

Apparently it is.

I found this article on the Guardian Book Blog about this very topic, via my good friends over at Teleread. It says, in part:

Microbes don’t fare too well on absorbent surfaces, and might survive only minutes on newspaper. But plastic book covers and those shiny, smooth surfaces of Kindles, iPhones and iPads are more accommodating, and it’s likely bugs can live on those for hours. A recent study by Curtis suggests that in Britain one in six mobile phones is contaminated with faecal matter, largely because people fail to wash their hands after going to the toilet.

I guess you’re better off taking an old paperback into the bathroom than an iPad. But as the article says, just washing your hands can go a long way in preventing the spread of germs.

Further, reading on the toilet might be good for you:

More interesting to Shaoul is whether the simple act of reading on the toilet has an impact on bowel movements. “We thought sitting and reading while you were on the toilet might be relaxing and make things go better,” Shaoul says. “We thought we might cure the world of constipation with our research.”

I’m going to leave it at that. Never in my blogging career did I think I’d write about electronics, reading and poo in the same post.

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Read More: Amazon Kindle, eReaders, Misc., Reading, Tablet Computers