PEW Research suggests surge in e-Reader purchases

A new research report from PEW suggests that e-Reader growth has surged since late last year (PEW):

The share of adults in the United States who own an e-book reader doubled to 12% in May, 2011 from 6% in November 2010. E-readers, such as a Kindle or Nook, are portable devices designed to allow readers to download and read books and periodicals. This is the first time since the Pew Internet Project began measuring e-reader use in April 2009 that ownership of this device has reached double digits among U.S. adults.

Tablet computers—portable devices similar to e-readers but designed for more interactive web functions—havehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif not seen the same level of growth in recent months. In May 2011, 8% of adults report owning a tablet computer such as an iPad, Samsung Galaxy or Motorola Xoom. This is roughly the same percentage of adults who reported owning this kind of device in January 2011 (7%), and represents just a 3 percentage-point increase in ownership since November 2010. Prior to that, tablet ownership had been climbing relatively quickly.

Download the full report.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 26): Books In Print, Journal Publishing, Joyce, Education and Technology, Area 51 and more.

Sam Andersen in the NY Times is stopped cold by an actual book (NYT):

The book was the The World Almanac and Book of Facts, an iconic yellow slab of lists and stats and graphs that has been, for the last century or so, holy scripture to the culture’s various ministers of information: journalists, writers of elementary-school reports, know-it-all uncles, “Jeopardy!” contestants. It promises to deliver, at the speed of print, all the world’s most important facts: the state bird of Oklahoma (the scissor-tailed flycatcher); the year Euripides was born (484 B.C.); the phone number for Gamblers Anonymous (213-386-8789); the major industries of Guyana (bauxite, sugar, rice milling, timber, textiles, gold mining). It is, in other words, basically the analog Internet — the Ghost of Search Engines Past.

Over the last decade, the almanac has been superseded, thoroughly, on just about every front. I’d assumed it had died, years ago, in the mass extinction that brought down (or mortally wounded) all of its informational cousins: the encyclopedia, the phone book, the printed dictionary, the classified ad, the paper road map and even the bookstore itself.

In this day and age, with the almost limitless ability to publish additional and related material, some journal publishers continue to cling to antiquated and out of touch editorial polices (NYT):

In March, for instance, Daryl Bem, a psychologist at Cornell University, shocked his colleagues by publishing a paper in a leading scientific journal, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which he presented the results of experiments showing, he claimed, that people’s minds could be influenced by events in the future, as if they were clairvoyant. Three teams of scientists promptly tried to replicate his results. All three teams failed. All three teams wrote up their results and submitted them to The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And all three teams were rejected — but not because their results were flawed. As the journal’s editor, Eliot Smith, explained to The Psychologist, a British publication, the journal has a longstanding policy of not publishing replication studies. “This policy is not new and is not unique to this journal,” he said.

As a result, the original study stands.

From Intelligent Life, Frank Delaney is trying to decipher James Joyce (IL):

Delaney—an Irish broadcaster and author based in New York—admits that as a young man he found "Ulysses" unreadable. But as the centenary of Joyce’s birth approached in 1982, he felt increasingly embarrassed by his failure to get through it. "I began to read it aloud, and it started to make sense—because it’s not a novel, it’s a prose poem." He went on to write a bestselling book about Joyce’s Dublin, after which Joyce became "a resident guest in my mind". He has now read "Ulysses" six times.

With his rich Irish intonation and palpable enthusiasm, he makes an ideal guide. The book, he declares, is one of the pleasures of life: "a vast, entertaining, funny, absorbing, exciting, complex, immensely enjoyable novel. A book to get lost in." It is also a book to listen to: "Joyce was a singer—he had a beautiful tenor voice—so he understood writing for the ear. In 'Ulysses' you can hear how he slips from one thought to another, which is fascinating."

From Inside Higher Ed a look at why educational publishers and small EdTech companies need each other (IHE):

In the next 2 years we will see an acceleration of investments and purchases in the edtech startup and edtech small company (revenues <=$20 million a year) space by the likes of Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Cengage.

Unsubstantiated dross: Why do publishers keep publishing this stuff. A review of Area 51 and I saw did see the interview on John Stewart and he seemed genuinely taken with the book (or maybe he's crazy) New Statesman:

But I speak too soon. It was all going so well, right up until page 370, when we are told that that the aircraft which is supposed to have crashed in Roswell was - get this! - a Nazi flying saucer sent over by the Soviets to create a mass panic of alien invasion. But, wait! There's more. The pilots were in fact "biologically and/or surgically reengineered children" produced on the orders of Joseph Stalin by none other than - ta dah! - Joseph Mengele.

Ms Jacobsen is adamant that the source for her tall story is completely reliable. "This," she told CBS News, "is information that came to me from the source, who I absolutely believe (and) stand by. I've spoken with him since the book has been published...and what he said was that the child-sized aviators had been the byproduct of this horrific human experimentation program by Stalin, in collaboration with the doctor from Auschwitz, Dr. Joseph Mengele."

In the Observer Robert McCrum thinks there's no reason print and e can't happily coexist (Observer):

The brilliant simplicity of the book should be the equal of the latest technology. Reading a book on a screen is like enjoying wine intravenously. The book remains an aesthetic as well as a literary experience. Owning printed books may soon become synonymous with collecting them.

Richard Charkin, director of Bloomsbury, sees digitisation as an opportunity. "The publisher chooses the book and turns it into something better, publicises it, markets it, and collects the money. What happens in a digital world is identical to that. I am more optimistic about the future than I can express."

Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of The Tipping Point, is possibly a bellwether. What's his next project? Gladwell is working with his publisher to produce his oeuvre in a high-priced box set. "There's a market for Porsche and BMW or Toyota and Fiat," he says, "but not much in between. So it's Prada or H&M, ebooks or hardbacks. The book is alive and well, just a tad more exclusive. Perhaps it's the next big thing."

A Federal Judge takes issue with the proposed settlement of a case brought against West Publishing and Kaplan over test prep materials for the LSAT and calls the coupon idea "laughable". (Law):

A federal judge refused to sign off on a second settlement in the BAR/BRI antitrust litigation after objectors raised concerns that Kaplan Inc.'s portion of the deal involved coupons.

The deal would have settled claims by class members alleging that Kaplan and West Publishing Corp. conspired to monopolize the market for bar review courses. West Publishing owns BAR/BRI and Kaplan sells preparatory courses for the Law School Admission Test. Under the settlement, West would have paid $5.29 million in cash and Kaplan would have provided coupons worth $150 each toward the purchase of future course materials.

Darwin's notes and marginalia go on line and will be available to scholars to understand how (or if) he came up with the Origin of the Species (Daily Mail - not a paper I normally read mind you).

Darwin had 1,480 books in his library, of which 730 contain a wealth of scrawled notes, providing clues to his thoughts as he wrote On The Origin Of Species. For example, his friend Charles Lyell wrote in his famous Principles Of Geology that there were definite limits to the variation of species.Darwin wrote alongside this: 'If this were true adios theory.' Academics hope the digitisation project will allow everyone to retrace how Darwin used reading to advance science. Anne Jarvis, librarian at Cambridge University, where most of the collection is held, said: 'The Darwin collections are among the most important and popular held within Cambridge University library. 'While there has been much focus on his manuscripts and correspondence, his library hasn't always received the attention it deserves - for it is as he engaged with the ideas and theories of others that his own thinking evolved.'

EBSCO Publishing and Elsevier Reach Agreement to Provide Full-Text Searching of All SciVerse ScienceDirect Journals & eBooks for EBSCO Discovery Service™ Customers (PRWeb):

Full text from SciVerse ScienceDirect is being added to EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) thanks to a new agreement from Elsevier and EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO). ScienceDirect, part of the SciVerse suite of search and discovery products provided by Elsevier, is a leading full-text scientific database with journal articles and book chapters from more than 2,000 peer-reviewed journals and 20,000 books and major reference works. ScienceDirect currently includes more than 10.5 million articles and chapters with nearly 500,000 added every year. Elsevier joins a growing list of publishers and other content partners that are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content. Partners include the world’s largest scholarly journal & book publishers including Elsevier, Wiley Blackwell, Springer Science & Business Media, Taylor & Francis Informa, Sage Publications, and thousands of others. Partners also include content providers, such as LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters (Web of Science), JSTOR, ARTstor, Credo Reference, Oxford University Press, World Book, ABC-CLIO, and many others.

From the twitter this week: Baker & Taylor and Barnes & Noble Partner to Build Library Access PRNewswire Apax’s Cengage Buying National Geographic’s School Publisher - BusinessWeek Amazon reprints Ed McBain: MediaBistro Random House relaunches Loveswept: MediaBistro What Big Media Can Learn From the New York Public Library - The Atlantic In sports: Babe Didrikson Zaharias’s Legacy Fades (NYT)

The Gap Between Ka Moa o Pele and Halali'i: Haleakala Crater

The Gap Between Ka Moa o Pele and Halali'i: Haleakala Crater

Another weekly image from the family archive. Click on it to make it larger.

It is almost impossible to describe the sheer extent of the Haleakala Crater that tops off the Hawaiian island of Maui. This image is taken virtually in the center of the crater on one of the hiking trails that course through the moon-like landscape. The trail is described in one of the Park's handouts: Ka Moa o Pele Trail branches from the foot of the Sliding Sands Trail to join the Halemauu Trail across the crater. It is a scenic route between silverswords on Ka Moa o Pele, a red cinder cone. Flowering plants can usually be seen from June to September. Pa Puaa o Pele, Pele's Pig Pen, is the rim of a spatter cone, now buried, in the low pass between Halalii and Ka Moa o Pele.

Close readers will know I lived on Maui for a while but this is taken on a subsequent vacation in 1991. Having said that the image could easily have been shot in 1891. (I’ve just had over 1,000 image of Hawaii scanned so there may be more to come). One of my other images in this series was taken at dawn from the observatory which is at an elevation of 10,000 feet. After hiking down into the crater to this point you will have descended over 2,000 feet. On this day we hiked into the crater from the observatory, then across the crater floor and up the ‘switch-back’ trail to Crater Rim road. At the point the trail meets up with the road the altitude is still about 1,000 feet below the summit and almost six miles from where you probably parked your rental. On this particular hike, we stupidly hiked the road back but on future visits we’ve done what most normal people do and thumb a ride back to the top. A long day but an incredible experience and recommended for any able bodied and hiker.

Map of the crater

Meeting Wenger of Union Square Ventures: Welcome to the Net Natives

Addressing the Hoboken Tech Meetup group Monday night, Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures (USV) provided the 150 attendees with a treatise on what works and why on the internet. Union Square Ventures only invests in companies that operate on the internet and,while that premise sounds simple, he told us that he and his colleagues at USV spend a lot of time thinking about what is different about the internet and what works and doesn’t. His comments to the group were interspersed with specific cases and he called on the example of the newspaper industry initially to expand on his first point by reflecting on the example of Craigslist and a company named AdOne. He noted, that while many investors made some money from AdOne, the company ultimately disappeared because it merely transferred an old legacy model to the web. Not so, in the case of Craigslist, which is a company that ‘broke the model’ and (as we know) provided a marketplace and network based on free provision of content (classifieds).

As Wenger stated, “Craig Newmark didn’t necessarily know what the impact of his business would be, but what he did know was that what he was doing was not dependent on anyone or any other business. He didn’t need to ask permission and he didn’t need to license information, he could just do it. Maybe by luck he backed into the ‘native model of the internet,’ which is largely exemplified by free services.” This ‘native model’ concept became a theme of Wenger’s comments for the rest of the presentation, and he stressed that USV tries to council entrepreneurs to make sure that their proposed business model represents (as he says) “what the internet wants to do.” Sometimes this isn't obvious as in the case of job listing sites like Monster.com and Hotjobs.com

As a subset of the classified market, both these companies made their investors rich and continue to be real businesses in that they have considerable revenues and profits. USV is an investor in Indeed.com, which is also a job listing service but ‘net native’ in contrast. Wenger expanded by suggesting that the problem is no longer getting your job listed (where the listee pays for the listing), now the problem is having the job found. Indeed.com provides aggregated lists of jobs available but, in a similar manner to Google, the company also matches jobs with key words and provides a better service to users in the process. This is how people use the internet: In a vertical search environment, key words can be bought to draw attention to position listing. This model, Wenger suggests, is much closer to a ‘net native business model’ which ‘doesn’t fight the web’ and where users are not asked to pay for something they can easily get for free elsewhere.

The partners at USV try to get entrepreneurs to think about how their business models ‘allow them to swim with the internet’ and build businesses that enable them to charge for services that add value, rather than charge for features as an auto dealer might by adding or deleting new car features to compute a price. Market leadership becomes a function of which company can build the best network. He also suggested that LinkedIN doesn’t have a great feature set, but has built such a dominant network that they will be very difficult to displace in the near future. The interconnectedness of all the participants on LinkedIN is the glue, and therefore, the value that holds the site together.

Sites like LinkedIN have developed business models that leverage the benefits of being part of the network and, thus, set a price for something that will have immediate and/or obvious value for the user. This is where – especially in the business-to-business segment - USV sees real opportunities. Coincidentally, at the meeting, several of the companies that presented (Sonar SquidJob BeanSprout) earlier in the evening are building their revenue models around the development of coherent, organized networks and not attempting to charge for access or services that are free elsewhere.

The catch phrase ‘net native business model’ is a great way to capture the concepts around some of the most successful internet start-ups: Think Twitter and 4Square, both of which are USV companies. Thinking in the terms Wenger suggests provides a framework for close examination of any new business idea and might save some good ideas from failure or lead to radically different approaches to a business idea.

In the question period, Albert was asked why it has been so hard to find networks in education and government and his response was both observant and depressing at the same time. He said,

“Selling to existing institutions is difficult because institutions generally select from companies that are good at selling. Because it is the administrators that are making the decisions based on processes and procedures. Companies which have great products or services, which would be appealing more to teachers and students, don’t have access. That’s how you end up with companies like Blackboard, which is a large, publicly traded company, very embedded but an awful product. But we are encouraged in that we are seeing some companies with innovation catering to products and service and these are getting adopted. Putting products into the market that are free and one we have invested in is Edmodo a network-based product that allows students and teachers in k-12 to work together”.

My impression of the Blackboard comment had more to do with what was possible in a net native world than a simple of-the-cuff denunciation of the Blackboard platform. With respect to government, he sees the same ‘broken procurement’ process based more on the process and mechanics of selling rather than on the benefits of particular products.

Naturally, I found these last comments very interesting based on my bias and experience in publishing and I would hasten to guess that government and education have been areas that USV have or continue to look at for opportunities. What would the completely disruptive “net native business model’ look like for education? Any ideas out there?