| Northern Ireland libraries have been loaning out eBooks since 2009. Patrons have recently been embracing the digital platform, as the digital collection improves. When eBooks first became available at Northern Ireland Libraries in 2011, there was only 363 eBooks to loan out. In 2014, the collection has grown and 9,439 titles were downloaded in a single month. On average, they are loaning out 363 a day. Since the start of this year, the most popular genre for e-book borrowers in Northern Ireland has been romantic fiction, followed by the work of crime writers. Library Patrons Embrace eBooks in Northern Ireland is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Monday, July 28, 2014
Library Patrons Embrace eBooks in Northern Ireland
App Businesses Not Making Enough to Survive
| When the Internet really started to take off and companies were making e-commerce profits hand over fist, all it took to make money was an idea and just enough technical skill to hang a web-shingle. Many years later, in much the same way, app developers are popping up everywhere –every day there are hundreds of new titles fighting for our attention. Some are worth it, but according to VisionMobile's latest Developer Economics report, many are not. Details in the report indicate that half of iOS developers, and 64% of Android developers are operating below the app poverty line (identified as making $500 per app per month). While it may seem like a reasonable profit for work that is already completed (once an app is released), one needs to see a return on their invested development time –but there is also a need to see revenue to compensate for Apple licensing, hardware, and ongoing support as required. It could be worse of course, 24% of all app developers are making nothing at all (and 23% are bringing in under $100 per month). If your idea is particularly amazing, or you have marketing genius that helps lead consumers to your app, you could find yourself among the 1.6% of development houses responsible for generating the most app store revenue (many making more than $500,000 for each app per month). At first glance it may seem like these figures shouldn’t be of particular concern to end-users, but consider that if developers are unable to sustain upgrade and support channels for the apps they put out, the app stores will soon be cluttered with junky apps that probably shouldn’t be bothered with. Consequences of those apps seen as disposable will ripple through app stores as users learn not to trust or rely on anything they download and install.
App Businesses Not Making Enough to Survive is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Podcast – Amazon Credit Reader, Storia Closing and eBook DRM
| Welcome to the Monday edition of the Good e-Reader Radio Show with Michael Kozlowski and Mercy Pilkington. Today, we talk about the new Amazon Credit Card Reader and how its a boon to indie authors to accept mobile payments while at events. Scholastic has announced the closure of their Storia eBook platform and is transitioning to a subscription system. Finally, many eBook resellers have gone out of business in the past few years, is your purchases protected? Podcast – Amazon Credit Reader, Storia Closing and eBook DRM is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Buying Books as Gifts Decline in the UK
| Buying that special someone a book for their birthday or Christmas is on the decline in the United Kingdom. The Nielsen Book Survey has just decreed that the share of books bought as gifts fell from 24% to 22% – equating to a decrease of nine million books. Jo Henry, director of the research, said that the decline in giving books as gifts would be of particular concern to publishers and called it a “concerning trend” which has also been seen in the US. Gifts accounted for 22% of book sales in 2013, down from 24% in 2012. She is calling for more research to find out the reasons why people are not buying books as gifts as much anymore. Nielsen also provided data on continuous climb of the eBook industry, as a whole. The survey found that digital eBooks now account for 25% of all book purchases (up from 20% in 2012) and that their growth is at the expense of paperbacks. Buying Books as Gifts Decline in the UK is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Vote for the next Big Library Read title!
 OverDrive is preparing for the next Big Library Read this coming October, and we are excited to invite you, your library staff, and your readers to help select the next Big Library Read title. October's title will be in the Young Adult category, and thanks to participating publishers, there's a great selection to choose from. To vote, simply visit https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BigLibraryRead. Feel free to share this link with your readers, too. We'll announce the winning title and provide more details about the October Big Library Read in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!  |
Do We Need Consumer Protection for eBooks?
| There is no true path of ownership when you purchase eBooks, digital comics or manga from online retailers. Instead, you are merely granted a license and if the store closes you will lose everything. In the last few years we have seen BooksonBoard, Diesel eBooks, FictionWise, JManga, Scholastic Storia, and the Sony Reader Store all shutter their doors. Do we need consumer protection laws to protect our eBooks? When Amazon sells you an an eBook for the Kindle they have the right to remove it at any time. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is referenced and Amazon can take your books away if it finds you’ve been naughty. Being naughty is fairly general and can apply to a myriad of factors. A Norwegian women tried to purchase a Kindle book from the UK bookstore. Under Amazon’s rules, this type of action is barred, as the publisher seeks to control what content is read in which territory of the world. Her account was promptly deleted and all content lost. Should you attempt to break the DRM security block or transfer your purchase to another device, Amazon may legally “revoke your access to the Kindle Store and the Kindle Content without refund of any fees.” In the past, Amazon has remotely deleted purchased copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindles after providing them a refund for the purchased products. This was primarily due to a rift with the original publisher and rights issues. Commenters have widely described these actions as Orwellian, and have alluded to Big Brother from Orwell’s book. When eBook stores decide they cannot stay in business anymore they allow for a small window period that allows you to backup the purchases and store them locally. If you are an average reader who might check the website or a use a reading app periodically, you will likely miss out the opportunity to save your books. Backing up your books presents a wide array of challenges when you want to read them in the future. When Sony or Diesel eBooks closed, the content was incompatible with the Kindle. Instead, readers had to find a third party reading app for iOS or Android, which are not heavily promoted. If readers have an e-reader such as the Kobo, Onyx or Icarus, they can use Adobe Digital Editions to transfer them over. This program is not the most intuitive and may present a barrier to the non tech savvy. There are only a few online bookstores of note that do not sell their books using Digital Rights Management (DRM) and allow for a somewhat clearer path of ownership. TOR books is a science fiction and fantasy imprint and they made the call to abandon DRM and sell books directly to customers. Pottermore came into existence as an avenue to use digital watermarks as a way to sell Harry Potter books, and not restrict how a user can read them. Self-publishing companies such as Smashwords leave it up to the author to decide if they want to employ DRM or not, but when you buy a Smashwords title from iBooks, it does have DRM. Theoretically, what would happen to your purchases if Smashwords went out of business? According to the latest numbers from the Association of American Publishers, adult trade ebooks brought in $1.3 billion in revenue in 2013, up 3.8% from $1.25 billion in 2012. Ebooks now account for 27% of all adult trade sales. With this much money at stake and more customers adopting them, consumer protection for digital books is going to be needed. Australia, Canada, Europe, UK and the United States do not have any current protection laws for digital books. They leave it up to the publishing industry and resellers to determine how best to run their own businesses and to develop their own licensing agreements. With millions of eBooks, comics and manga being lost after purchasing on a worldwide scale, something needs to be done to augment the First Sale Doctrine, Copyright Software Rental Amendments Act and Digital Millenium Copyright Act to protect customers from companies indiscriminately removing purchased content or to save it from a company going out of business. Do We Need Consumer Protection for eBooks? is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Apple Buys BookLamp, Creators of Book Genome Project
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According to TechCrunch, things became a little cryptic in April of this year, at least on BookLamp’s end. Once the anonymous tipster let it be known that Apple had completed the purchase for between $10million and $15million, which includes all of the technology and the manpower within the company. Facebook (of all places) provided some more of the clues, as key team members from BookLamp still listed Boise as their places of residence but had multiple FB posts that were tagged from the Cupertino, California, location. As to how this is going to help Apple take down Amazon, as some reports are already claiming, that remains to be seen. Amazon purchased Goodreads over a year ago, with some estimates on the cost ranging from between $150 million and over one billion dollars. While the move has been good for Amazon, for Goodreads, and even for readers, it doesn’t appear to have been a game changer within the bookselling industry, at least not in the way that these kinds of dollars reflect. One thing that has come out, though, is a renewed focus on Apple’s part in terms of selling titles through its iBooks platform. With agreements already in place with publishers and even Smashwords, and with the iOS8 update coming this fall that is supposed to make book purchasing even more streamlined, incorporating a search feature for right-fit books makes a lot of sense. Of course, as Apple explained to TechCrunch, the company has a long history of buying smaller tech companies and then not discussing the details. Apple could just as easily have plans for the BookLamp technology–say in the area of app discovery–that doesn’t have much to do with bookselling.
Apple Buys BookLamp, Creators of Book Genome Project is a post from: Good e-Reader |
100 years since World War I: build a Morse code virtual radio
| On this day 100 years ago, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia in response to the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. As the dominos began to tumble Russia mobilised against Austria-Hungary, causing Germany to declare war on Russia. Germany then invaded Luxembourg and declared war on France; and on the 4th of August the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. So began one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, that would draw in all of the great economic powers of the world, lasting until November the 11th 1918. A century later the effect of this war is still with us. Every one of us has some kind of connection to it, whether it be an impact on our family history or on the place we live. This year events are taking place all over the world to commemorate and remember the millions of people who lost their lives. You can visit www.1914.org to find out more.  The cover of QST magazine showing a call for women radio operators. We expect lots of schools will be taking part in these events, and in the spirit of commemoration we have put together an educational resource called the Morse Code Virtual Radio. This allows you to simulate and experience the main form of radio communication that was used back then, using your Raspberry Pi. If you have an ancestor who was an ex-telegraph operator or world war serviceman, you may have an old Morse Code key in your attic which you could use.  An antique Morse Code key. Invented by Samuel Morse in the year 1836, Morse Code is a method for sending and receiving text messages using short and long tones. It was adapted for early radio communication, before it was possible to send or receive voice, and was used extensively during both world wars. Morse Code is also a really great skill to have. There is a very human element to it which is difficult to quantify and describe. Human skill is required to key in Morse Code correctly which takes only minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master. Skill is also required to listen to the tones and decode them. Our educational resource provides learning opportunities for both aspects. Want to have a go? You’ll find everything you need here on our resources pages. |
See The Apps Your Friends Use With Homer
| There are millions of apps floating around out there, and you’ve installed a good number of them… which are worth keeping? Often the best apps on your smartphone or tablet came to reside there by way of recommendations from friends and family, and thanks to PayPal co-founder Max Levchin you can find out what they are using without even having to ask. Homer is an app available for the iPhone that lets you share your app picks with fellow users. There is no magic to Homer, it’s all about screenshots of the screens on your phone. Not to worry, privacy features are built-in –which shots you share are completely voluntary. Is there value in an app like Homer? Truthfully I’m not so sure that I care what most of my friends have installed, but I’m terribly interested in what productivity apps colleagues are using. Consider the lists of tips put out by highly successful people, wouldn’t it be interesting to see what they have installed on their smartphones? Unfortunately there isn’t an Android version of Homer available just yet, but it seems reasonable to expect that one will head our way soon.
See The Apps Your Friends Use With Homer is a post from: Good e-Reader |
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