eBook News

The ongoing adaptation of art which "used" to include book and now will have ebook readers. Pierre Auguste Renoir's  Breakfast at Berneval reading iBooks with an iPad Wall painting from.Pompeii - Portrait of Menander  (c. 70 CE) reading from a Kindle Fire 

There has been a lot of chatter lately about how Amazon.com announcing that in the US Susanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy has been outselling J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Amazon's editorial director stated that this could be due to the growth in digital reading that has occurred, and the the Hunger Games series is consistently on the Top 10 list in both print and Kindle formats, and that the book "The Hunger Games is also the most-borrowed book in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library." Although this data only is for Amazon, after all there are over 400 million Potter books compared to 23 million Hunger Games. But it does perhaps start indicating the change in how the public wants their books. Both book in the US are though the Scholastic Publisher, but Hunger Games was first to go digital, and became Amazon's first young adult author to be named to Amazon's Kindle Million club (although now Harry Potter books are available through Pottermore, bu...

I've been reading a lot lately about how ebooks are now outselling printed book in the area of adult fiction. Andy by that I don't mean ADULT adult fiction (although I've seen that those numbers are way up too - look at the digital sales of 50 Shades of Gray), but fiction for adults.  According to an article in the NY Post, ebook now represent 30% of the net revenue for adult fiction. In just one year, there as been an increase of over 200% more ebooks being sold, from 125 million in 2010 to 388 million in 2011, with more books being sold overall and a 12% increase in ebook sales in the Children's/Young Adult section. I've also seen elsewhere that that increase in YA sales may not necessarily be related to young adults. Good books are good books, and it shouldn't matter if it was written for younger or older readers, now ability matters, but it can be good for the reader to not struggle all the time, so an adult o...

A recent study by researchers at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center observed families reading printed books , basic e-books , which are essentially print books put into a digital format with minimal features like highlighting text and audio narration, and enhanced e-books , which feature more interactive multimedia options like games, videos and interactive animations.  When kids were asked one plot question for each story, (i.e., “Why did x do y?”), there was  no  difference between the print book readers and the enhanced e-book readers. The difference found was between the ways parent-child pairs interacted with print, basic and enhanced formats. The enhanced format tended to elicit less content related interaction (e.g. elaborating on the picture) and more non-content related interaction (e.g. "Don't touch that yet") than the print and basic formats, which may have affected how much the children recalled from the story. The implications of the study for ebook...

A recent survey of about 2000 British persons found some interesting reading patterns. They report that people use ereaders use the ebook to hide what someone is actually reading such as 58% read adolescent/children's books, and 26% Science Fiction and Fantasy. When looking at physical books on people's shelves, it was found that 71% was non-fiction (which is only 14% on the digital shelf). And that the majority of people (55%) had read less than a third of the books on their shelves and that 10% hadn't' read any. I'm not sure that "Shame" is the right word though, it just not being public or boasting about something. I pretty sure that those reading science fiction would talk about the books they are reading when they were with other science fiction readers, but they just don't want the confrontation or judgement of others who don't read or respect those books. Which is worse, reading something you like or buying books to make ...

I think that something like this makes a great bridge for allowing one-to-one computing and being able to put an ebook device into everyone's hands. This seems like a kind of adaptation on the bring your own device option that seems to being successful. The cost to update school systems may be too much for them to be able to do in the current economy. Large schools systems have often been working or a rotation basis for their schools, but this means that every school that gets technology is getting something different than last year's and it means that you can't implement district wide policy as some schools just are not there yet. And by the time they are the first schools have such old tech that they need to be updated.  Options like implementing a buy/rental program and bring-your-own-device create workable options for schools to start integrating today's ebook technology today, and not sometime in the next few years. Calif. school to require studen...

I think that schools will (at least for the most part) be going digital with their textbooks, if only for the costs. A big meeting was held about digital textbooks into U.S. classrooms by the FCC and the Department of Education, included everyone from Apple to Intel to McGraw-Hill was in attendance.  Their finding were that doing so could save about $60 per student per year - something that could be a nice summative savings. I equate this to how Pres. J. Carter "found" so much oil, by having us use less such as by increased gas mileage.  I know that 60$ doesn't sound like much, although trying to get a 60$/student increase today would seem impossible, but remember how many students that there are and then start adding the years. In my district if we could that would mean: 60 $/student 200,000 students in my school district =12,000,000 $saving/year At a school were the state just told us we had to cut 6 million dollars, a 12 million savings in a year, would be...