eBook News

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 &...

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...

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...