eBook News

First and foremost I want to thank the Pew Internet project for collecting and disseminating information about ebooks and reading. I love the data itself, I just always want more.  Whenever I read articles about reading habits and devices, I always wonder not just about the devices (or no device) that people are reading from, but I also wonder about the people being questioned about how much that they read. I see statements like the "more than 8 in 10 Americans ages 16-29 read a book in the past year and 6 in 10 used their local public library" and it makes me think about other questions. I remember when I was at the Butterfly exhibit in Gainesville, and the docent mentioned that this was the second largest butterfly habitat in the world, well the next words that I said (and at least three others at the same time) was "what is the largest?" So when I see something that mentions that 8 out of 10 people read a book that year, I wonder "at...

Really interesting inforgraphic created by Aptaracorp and Publishers Weekly

UPDATE 3/13/2013: just read that the final selling price will be $69 not $15, in large part because they didn't get a cellphone company to underwrite the device - in which case that makes it cost just about the same as a base kindle (which is a more capable device). Just came across 'txtr's beagle  ( http://us.txtr.com/beagle /) today and I think it could be the next exciting thing for schools to consider. Right now it isn't available in the US, but they are working to make it for sale here. What makes it so different, it's the price and the batteries. Their plan is to sell it for about $15US and it runs on AAA rechargeable. This isn't a truly interactive reader, not touch screen or note taking, just the basic read with three control buttons. But as we start to think about Bring Your Own Device or Tech (BYOD-BYOT), here is something that will work well with smart phones and just the cost of two mass market paperback books and well less than the cost of one ...

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...