Goodnight, Sweet Print

By Ted Heller

THE YEAR IS 2001 and I am on the subway. It is the Number 1 train, going uptown, and I am heading to a reading of Slab Rat, my first published novel. (It’s my first ever reading, too, and I’m nervous.) It’s four in the afternoon and the car I’m on is not crowded. I see, directly across from me, a gorgeous, olive-skinned brunette sitting and reading a book.  She’s not tall enough to be a model and not quite emaciated enough, but she is on the flawless side (her nose is a bit long, but who cares?). I swallow and tell myself not to stare and I follow through on it: I do not stare, for that would just be wrong. But then, while nobly avoiding eye contact, I see what book she is reading. It’s Slab Rat! Oh my God! She’s reading my book and, I can tell, she’s enjoying it, too. Perhaps she’s also on her way to the reading?

This opportunity, I quickly realize, is highly unlikely to ever occur again. I may never get another book published, and if I do ever get another book published I may not ever again see someone else reading it, and if I do ever get a book published and see someone else reading it, the person most likely will most likely not be, as this woman is, a dead ringer for Monica Vitti circa The Red Desert. Should I do something? Do I bust some sort of move? “You have to do something,” I hear a strange, anxious voice telling me. It’s my voice . . . and it’s saying: “This is one of the three reasons you became a writer in the first place, fool!” (The other two reasons being: 1) to write books that don’t sell well, and 2) because I can’t do anything else.) So, after the subway comes to a sudden stop between stations, I stand up and approach her and tell her that I am the author of the book that is currently reducing her to hysterics. She looks up at me, looks at the photo on the book jacket, and tears of delight quickly well in her eyes. She begins to melt.

The above scene did not happen. Of course it didn’t.

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Do e-readers inhibit reading comprehension?

Research suggests that the devices can prevent readers from wholly absorbing longer texts

By Ferris Jabr

In a viral YouTube video from October 2011 a 1-year-old girl sweeps her fingers across an iPad’s touchscreen, shuffling groups of icons. In the following scenes she appears to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as though they too were screens. When nothing happens, she pushes against her leg, confirming that her finger works just fine — or so a title card would have us believe.

The girl’s father, Jean-Louis Constanza, presents “A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work” as naturalistic observation — a Jane Goodall among the chimps moment — that reveals a generational transition. “Technology codes our minds,” he writes in the video’s description. “Magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives” — that is, for people who have been interacting with digital technologies from a very early age.

Perhaps his daughter really did expect the paper magazines to respond the same way an iPad would. Or maybe she had no expectations at all — maybe she just wanted to touch the magazines. Babies touch everything. Young children who have never seen a tablet like the iPad or an e-reader like the Kindle will still reach out and run their fingers across the pages of a paper book; they will jab at an illustration they like; heck, they will even taste the corner of a book. Today’s so-called digital natives still interact with a mix of paper magazines and books, as well as tablets, smartphones and e-readers; using one kind of technology does not preclude them from understanding another.

Nevertheless, the video brings into focus an important question: How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read?

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Why Japanese readers don’t like e-books

Japan has some of the fastest internet connections in the world, but physical media such as books and DVDs still remain popular.

By Michael Fitzpatrick

Despite Japan’s “default-setting-for-the future” status, coined by Sci-fi writer William Gibson, time on this rocky archipelago appears to be headed backwards. Kerosene is replacing nuclear energy; deflation, not inflation, is still rife; and, publishers are clinging energetically to print when, in neighboring South Korea, it seems to have been abandoned altogether.

Why have Japanese consumers not fallen in love with digital reading? “So far the Japanese have failed to be moved by e-readers from home or abroad, mostly owing to a paucity of content,” says editor and publisher of Japan’s E-book 2.0 magazine Hiroki Kamata. Sony , for instance, has been in the market for more than seven years but has sold only 500,000 e-readers in Japan. Other manufacturers’ tablets have begun to sell here, but overall the category is still way behind e-reader take-up in the U.S. or Europe. Tablet sales have tripled since 2011, with market research firm IDC estimating tablet sales in Japan to be 3.6 million units.

 

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E-readers reading your reading: A serious invasion of privacy?

The end of private browsing …

A new report shows that almost all such devices monitor users’ activity. This doesn’t really bother me, but should I be more worried?

By Alison Flood

In the light of a feature I wrote this summer, about how our e-readers can track our reading habits – complete, I’m ashamed to say, with the obligatory Orwell references – I thought I’d point anyone who’s interested in the direction of this new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It’s the organisation’s latest guide to e-reader privacy policies, including Amazon’s Kindle, Kobo and Sony, and it finds that “in nearly all cases, reading ebooks means giving up more privacy than browsing through a physical bookstore or library, or reading a paper book in your own home”.

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Kobo to launch in South Africa

| By Lisa Campbell

Kobo is to launch in South Africa in partnership with Pick n Pay hyperstores and supermarkets.

Amazon already sells Kindle devices in South Africa and now Kobo will attempt to win market share from the digital reading giant with the Kobo Touch device.

The Kobo South Africa website says it will offer popular literature by “notable local authors”, with books in both English and Afrikaans.

 

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Japan finally embraces e-reader revolution

E-readers have been a rare sight on Japan’s packed commuter trains until now, but that could be about to change. Photograph: Sutton-Hibbert/Rex Features

Japan’s leading online retailer Rakuten is hoping to see off Amazon’s Kindle and corner the world’s second-largest publishing market.

By Justin McCurry

For a nation of technology-loving avid readers, Japan has been slow to join the digital publishing revolution. While consumers in the US and Europe increasingly turn to e-readers, many Japanese have stubbornly refused to part with conventional reading matter.

Look around the carriage of a packed commuter train and most people will still be immersed in a book, not flicking through the virtual pages of a Kindle.

Manga comics that can be read on mobile phones are one of the country’s few success stories in digital publishing.

But that could all be about to change from Thursday, when the Japanese online retail giant Rakuten launches an e-reader it hopes will see off an expected challenge from Amazon’s device later this year, and corner the world’s second-biggest publishing market.

While several firms, including Sony, have already attempted to grow the digital market, Rakuten and Amazon are expected to be key – and bitter – rivals. At stake is a slice of a book market estimated to be worth $23.5bn (£15bn).

Rakuten’s chief executive, Hiroshi Mikitani, has made no secret of his desire to take on Amazon. During a recent e-book fair in Tokyo, the 49-year-old entrepreneur brandished a T-shirt bearing the message: “Destroy Amazon.”

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Ebooks: winners in the generation game

Ebook consumption among older age groups continues to grow. Photograph: dbphots/Alamy/Alamy

The growth of e-reading among older age groups shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.

By Anna Baddeley

New technology, like pop music or radical politics, is something you’re expected to lose touch with as you get older. This idea is encouraged by the young, who would rather their elders gracefully embraced luddism than try to befriend them on Facebook. What’s refreshing about e-reading is that it’s not just popular with traditional early adopters; their parents are getting in on the act too.

According to market researcher Bowker, while younger people’s ebook consumption is plateauing, in older age groups it continues to grow: more than a quarter of 45- to 55-year-olds and a fifth of over-55s bought an ebook in the six months to March 2012, up from 17% and 15% last November. A OnePoll survey last year found the over-55s were more likely to own an e-reader than 18- to 24-year-olds.

We shouldn’t be too surprised: older people tend to be heavier book-buyers and baby-boomers keen technophiles. But e-readers have qualities that could make them indispensable to an ageing population.

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Socially networked reading: Hey, take a look at this

With reading moving to e-readers, apps are being developed to enable users to share thoughts via iPhone, iPad and other electronic readers. (Martin Bureau / AFP / Getty Images)

Reading doesn’t have to be a solitary activity. Increasingly, apps are being developed to enable users to electronically share thoughts.

By Carolyn Kellogg

Look ahead: The presents have been opened, wrapping thrown away, and for a few quiet hours you’ve been curled up reading the new Steve Jobs biography, a gift from your dad. You find a surprising detail and call to your significant other, “Honey, did you know …?” but because he is busy making dinner, the idea fizzles away as you turn the page.

Or maybe when you get to that passage, with the swipe of a finger you highlight it and email it to your dad, adding a thanks for his gift. Or you click to add your thoughts to a chorus of readers who found that same passage interesting; or you check to see if there’s a link to a video clip; or you find an annotation from the author; or you post it to Twitter or Facebook or Google+, where others can comment on it too.

That’s called “social reading,” and it’s coming to an e-reading app or device near you.

“Increasingly, the devices we use to read — the Kindle, your iPad, various types of phones and other devices — they’re connected,” says James Bridle, a British writer and publisher who’s been at the forefront of ebook development. “They have a whole bunch of capabilities that the paper book didn’t have.”

Put those connected, capable devices together with books and add the best aspects of social networking — sharing, conversation — and the result is social reading. It is a logical step that’s still taking shape; it’s in its Wild West days, mapping out boundaries, players staking out sometimes overlapping territory.

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A Tumultuous Year in Books

By Peter Osnos

 Borders fell and Kindle soared as more and more people adopted e-readers

This has been a tumultuous year for the book business, a time of profound change in the way books are distributed and read. It is no exaggeration to say that the widespread acceptance of digital devices and a simultaneous contraction of shelf-space in stores qualify as a historic shift. The demise of Borders, the country’s second-largest book chain as recently as a year ago, was largely offset by the sale of millions of e-readers and electronic books on a vast scale in a market now dominated by Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Google. In May, Amazon announced that it was selling more e-books than print books. On “Black Friday,” November 25, Amazon said it had sold four times as many Kindles in a single day as it did in 2010. At this rate, it seems increasingly likely that e-books will match printed books in the next few years, and eventually overtake them.

The popularity of multi-use tablets–Apple’s iPads, the Kindle Fire (which has drawn criticism for a variety of technical glitches), B&N’s Nook, and several others–has been another dominant feature of the year, serving up thousands of apps for games, music, magazines, and news sites, depending on your choice of device and price. As measured by IHS iSuppli research, and reported in the New York Times, Apple will ship about 18.6 million iPads in this quarter; the Kindle Fire, which went on sale in November, will sell about four million devices; and the Nook tablet will ship 1.3 million. While tablets have scores of uses, e-books have so far held their own as defining attractions in the digital era. Their role is reminiscent of the way DVDs transformed the movie business in the 1990s, posing a major challenge for theaters while expanding the market for players to be used at home.

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Apple’s struggle to defeat Amazon set to be exposed by European ebook inquiry

Britons bought 12.7m ebooks in the first half of 2011, according to the Publishers Association. Photograph: Tooga/Getty Images

The deal that the iPad maker struck with publishers could be threatened by an inquiry into the prices people in the EU pay for their digital reading.

By Juliette Garside

For book publishers, Christmas will come twice this year. After the festive trade in hardback tomes, the celebrations will begin again on Boxing Day, as the millions who got Kindles from Santa go online to stock them with reading material.

Amazon already sells more ebooks than paperbacks. It claims sales of Kindle devices have reached 1m a week, while 13m iPads will find a home this quarter. Juniper Research forecasts 25m e-readers sales globally this year, and 55.2m tablet sales.

The British bought 12.7m ebooks in the first half of 2011, double the amount for the same period last year, according to the Publishers Association. By common consent, January will be a record month for digital books.

But regulators, both in Europe and the United States, are worried that shoppers may be overpaying. This month, both the European commission and the US department of justice have announced investigations into ebook sales. They are to lift the lid on a power struggle between the publishing industry and Amazon that could determine the shape of the book trade for years to come.

The European commission will probe the “agency” deals signed between Apple and five of the biggest publishers: Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Macmillan.

The trouble began in early 2010. Worried about declining physical book sales, publishers feared Amazon’s eye-catching discounts would devalue their electronic product. So they agreed to a business model proposed by Apple just before the release of the first iPad. It was a move intended to force the world’s largest bookseller to relinquish control over pricing.

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