eBook News

 From the Mental Daily (https://www.mentaldaily.com/article/2022/01/survey-finds-three-in-ten-americans-are-readers-of-e-books)  There are a substantial number of American adults that prefer to read electronic formatted books, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center “Americans are spreading their book consumption across several formats,” the authors of a Pew report stated. “The share of adults who have read print books in the past 12 months still outpaces the share using other forms, but 30% now say they have read an e-book in that time frame.” The  Pew report  found that 65 percent of American adults surveyed preferred reading a print book in the past year. The survey was conducted during January and February of 2021. These kinds of questions always make me wonder why they didn't also ask how many books the people read so that that information could also be included. If you only ask if "they have read an ebook, audiobook, or print book then that is a 0 or 1...

 Perhaps there is only so much TV a person can stand or perhaps it is the restrictions that some put on themselves against going to stores for anything other than groceries, or perhaps some people know how printed books have been shown to be disease carriers  ( COVID can be found up to three days in printed books ), or maybe it is a mix, either way, libraries have seen a growth in ebook use.  The Northbrook library in Illinois published that they saw dramatic growth in their digital checkout, with a 308% increase in ebook checkouts and a 165% increase in digital audiobook downloads, compared to the same month in 2019.  The District of Columba Public Libraries saw a similar impact, with an increase in digital checkouts that was 37% higher as compared to the same month last year. In Ireland, the latest data on book patronage has shown that during the pandemic downloads of ebooks downloads have increased to 529,416 over the last nine months (2020), while the total for l...

I am a strong believer in reading in any format, on paper, eink, digital, and even audio. They are all ways of conveying the content or story and all can be great ways to read new books or visit old favorites.  AudioFile has just opened the SYNC: Audiobooks for Teens' 10th season. Starting this week teens (and others) can download two titles that are paired each week for the next 14 weeks (till August 1). Each of the pairs will be available for free during their week. Readers can download the books using the Overdrive app, and once you have downloaded them they are yours for free. So if you know a teen introduce him or her to some new titles or format or allow yourself to try some young adult books. There are also some other greats including Shakespeare's Othello and one of my science favorites Mary Roach's Gulp. SUMMER 2019 SYNC TITLE PAIRINGS Week 1: April 25 – May 2 SWING by Kwame Alexander, with Mary Rand Hess, narrated by Kwame Alexander (Blink) BLINK &...

I find it interesting how many times I have discussions with others about what classifies as "reading". So many don't include other forms, such as audio although they get very hesitant when I ask about braille. I do understand that with print, such as you are reading now, it is the combination of the saccades and fixations to combine the elements into a whole word, and the words into sentences, and on and on. But if part of that "literacy" is the understanding, then listening to the words, or feeling the letters and words should also count. In one of my classes the students are required to "read" a book by listening. One good thing that I think that they experience is the struggle in "learning to read" as an adult. For most of us, learning to read occurred so long ago that you don't remember what it was like to learn that. Now as my students as adults are trying to read their audio book they talk about the fatigue they experiences through...

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...

Today's posting is a little different from the others, in that it's not related to a news article, but instead are some of my own personal observations dealing with an ebook aspect. I had a good amount of experience with a wide variety of read aloud systems including text-to-speech tools. For example, I often use text-to-speech tools when reading dissertations, this allows me to have a multimodality form of reading, improving my reading and I found this to be very effective. So with my Kindle I thought I would experiment with having it read to me a variety of different kinds of books and see what happened. For the past few weeks I've been having my Kindle read me a textbook that I'm using with one of my classes. I often listen to this textbook while I'm driving longer distances or riding my bike, and as lately I've been taking a number of trips that have me driving for about two to three hours each way it gave me a way to more effectively beyond just listening t...