Another study confirms our suspicions that reading books on computer or e-book screens compromises learning and retention. Experiments with children and college students have pointed to the conclusion that screen media are more distracting than their paper counterparts.

Now a study conducted by product development consultancy Nielsen Norman Group has quantified these conjectures. Participants were asked to read some stories by Ernest Hemingway in printed form and on a variety of e-reading devices: an iPad, a Kindle and a desktop PC.

The results, as reported by Lauren Indvik of Mashable, were eye-opening: reading speeds were 6.2% slower on the iPad and 10.7% on the Kindle. “Participants also complained about the weight of the iPad and the Kindle’s weak contrast,” Indvik writes.  Comprehension suffered, too, especially on the PC, where readers complained that it “reminded readers of work.”

The sampling was modest – 24 participants  (Indvik says that “10 is about average for a usability survey”) – and is far from conclusive. But the indications are ominous. “I can see universities and businesses taking less kindly to e-readers if further studies prove that they handicap reading speed,” says Indvik. This comes just as schools and governments consider switching from paper to e-textbooks. See Hasta La Vista, Textbooks.

For further reading see Watching Books, The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction, More Evidence that Screens=Distraction, and Students Give E-Textbooks Failing Grade).

Richard Curtis

E-book sales statistics for May 2010 have been released by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in conjunction with the International Digital Publishing Forum and there’s been yet another might leap: trade eBook sales were $29,300,000 for May, a 260% increase over May 2009 ($11,200,000).

We’ve become so spoiled by triple and quadruple sales growth that when the jump is “only” 260% we begin to fret that sales are starting to flatten.  But our statisticians remind us that the real numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts. Even if they aren’t, every business should all be so lucky to experience “flat” business growth of 260%!

As always, we’re reminded by AAP and IDPF that…

• The data above represent United States revenues only
• The data above represent only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels.
  
• The data above represent only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
• The data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
• The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
• The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is “All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices”
• The IDPF and AAP began collecting data together starting in Q1 2006

Richard Curtis

Cliff Guren and Pam Turner, executives of Skiff, the recently developed e-book platform, have just announced the company’s acquisition by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

In a review of e-book readers last January we cited Dan Nosowitz, Gizmodo’s reviewer, who gave Skiff high marks for beauty, slimness, weight, screen size and functionality: “I just got a chance to play with the big-screened, touchscreened Skiff Reader, which is targeted at periodicals. It’s incredibly thin, incredibly light, and they’ve even got a color screen prototype—Kindle and Nook should be scared.”

Kindle and Nook may not have been scared then but perhaps they will be now. Rupert Murdoch has given numerous hints that he wants to develop his own e-book reader(See Press Baron Murdoch Ready to Get E-Ink on His Fingers?)  and now he has one off the shelf.

Here’s the notification emailed by Guren to publishing partners.
******************************

Dear Skiff Publishing Partner,

I’m writing to share with you that Skiff’s publishing platform has been acquired by News Corp. As News Corp. announced yesterday, this acquisition is part of News Corp.’s commitment to premium digital journalism and to developing new ways for publishers to monetize their content online and via a wide range of devices.

We are pleased that News Corp. has recognized the value of Skiff’s accomplishments and we attribute that in part to the fine partners that have worked with us to this point.

In connection with this sale, Skiff, LLC will be winding down its current operations. We fully expect News Corp. may want to consider opportunities to renew the relationship we’ve had with you at Skiff. In the meantime, we appreciate your continued discretion under the confidentiality agreement that we have in place.

While some members of the Skiff team will be joining this effort, Pam Turner and I will be heading off to pursue other opportunities. As a result, I wanted to let you know that Lee Shirani (lshirani@skiff.com) will be following up with you.

Pam and I deeply value your support. We consider ourselves privileged to part of the publishing community. Thank you… We look forward to working with you again.

My personal contact information going forward is as follows [Deleted]:
Regards,

Cliff Guren and Pam Turner

Cliff Guren
Vice President, Content Acquisition

Her: I read a wonderful book the other day.
Him: On what?
Her: On relationships
Him: No, I mean on what device did you read it? Kindle? Nook? Sony? iPad?
Her: Kindle. Anyway, this book said some really important things about how couples communicate.
Him: Kindle? You could probably see an enhanced version with all kinds of extras on the iPad. Is it audio enabled?`
Her: I don’t know. Would you like to know what the author said about listening to the other person?
Him: Will I be able to see it on YouTube? Hey, why are you packing your suitcase?

This sad exchange might be cited by Deborah Tannen if she ever decided to update You Just Don’t Understand, her insightful book describing how difficult it is for men and women to communicate with each other.  The “Her” in the story was talking about what interested her (her relationship with Him) and the “Him” was talking about what interested him (cool stuff).

This divergence between content and form manifests itself more and more as the format crowds out content in media’s bid for our attention. Books are a salient example. As the publishing industry shifts from paper to screen, the qualities of the book itself just don’t seem as significant as the packaging and delivery technology. It’s begun to be reflected in editorial attitudes: ”Great concept, marvelous characters, super plot. But the author has no platform and a boring website. Sorry.”

Even reviewers have contracted the disease, especially those who cover the media online. Jason Kottke, posting a blog entitled The New Rules for Reviewing Media, observed “I’ve noticed an increasing tendency by reviewers on Amazon (and Apple’s iTunes and App Stores) to review things based on the packaging or format of the media with little regard shown to the actual content/plot.”

Unlike newspaper and magazine reviewers, says Kottke, their Internet cousins ask “whether a book would be good to read on a Kindle, if you should buy the audiobook version instead of the hardcover because John Hodgman has a delightful voice, if a magazine is good for reading on the toilet, if a movie is watchable on an iPhone or if you need to see it in 1080p on a big TV, if a hardcover is too heavy to read in the bath, whether the trailer is an accurate depiction of what the movie is about, or if the hardcover price is too expensive and you should get the Kindle version or wait for the paperback. Or, as the above reviewers hammer home, if the book is available to read on the Kindle/iPad/Nook or if it’s better to wait until the director’s cut comes out.”

Kottke has put his finger on a significant trend, but although he neither condones or condemns it, we’ve expressed growing concern (see Watching Books) that literature will be judged on the most superficial grounds: not how artistic it is, but what’s the best gadget to read it on.

“In the end,” writes Kottke, “people don’t buy content or plots, they buy physical or digital pieces of media for use on specific devices and within certain contexts.”

Troubling.

Richard Curtis

Stephen Windwalker, editor of The Kindle Nation, reports on Teleread that “Ebooks accounted for 29% of all first week sales of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” the third novel in the bestselling Stieg Larsson trilogy.

According to Michael Cader, posting on his Publishers Marketplace website, out of 425,000 units, 125,000 were e-books. That comes to an extraordinary 29.4%. If percentages like that hold up for future frontlist releases, it will be hard to argue that the paradigmatic e-book tipping point has not yet arrived.

RC

E-book sales are growing exponentially.  Print book sales are flat.  So -  how long will it take for e-books to punch through the print books envelope?

Before you raise your hand, work this into your calculations: e-book sales are on track to top $400 million in 2010.  The print book business is estimated at $24 billion. That’s 60x e-book revenues.

That equation has not daunted Sony, manufacturer of Kindle’s rival e-book reader, from projecting that in five years E will surpass P, according to Shane Richmond, Head of Technology for Telegraph.co.uk. Richmond writes that the president of Sony’s digital reading business division actually cut his projection from ten years to five after observing that “The same patterns that Sony had seen in the digitization of music and photography are now being repeated in the books market.”

Full article here.

Richard Curtis

One year ago, reporting trade e-book sales statistics for the first quarter of 2009. we wrote “We’re running out of superlatives.” What inspired our hyperbole were $26 million in sales, exceeding 2008’s first quarter by 131%. Having exhausted our purple prose a year ago, what’s left for us to say about the $91,000,000 first quarter sales posted in 2010, 3 1/2 times those of the same period a year ago. How about this: Q1-10 almost matches the total sales for all of 2006 ($20 M), 2007 ($31.2 M) and 2008 ($53.5 M).

And March 2010? $28.5 million, almost three times that of the same month one year ago.

These statistics compliments of the Association of American Publishers in conjunction with the International Digital Publishing Forum, which reminds us that:

* This data represents United States revenues only
* This data represents only trade e-book sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
* This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
* This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
* The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
* The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is “All books delivered electronically over the Internet or to hand-held reading devices”

Richard Curtis

Last year California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger launched an initiative to replace printed textbooks with digital versions.  His motives were purely financial, and who could blame him? His state’s economy was in the toilet, and it still is. But before going all in on e-textbooks The Terminator wanted to get some feedback from end users.

He’s getting it in spades but it’s not what he wants to hear. Students around the nation are flunking the format. They want their paper books back. It seems that e-readers are okay for reading, but textbooks are seldom read immersively like novels, and so far the e-books can’t match the functionality of good old paper. And even when it comes to reading for pleasure, gadgets like the Kindle DX tablet did not fetch high grades.

The first school to check in was the University of Wisconsin after experimenting with the DX for a history course.  As we reported last January, “Many said in response to questions of the baseline survey that they preferred printed books for sustained and serious reading…Within a few weeks after the start of the [first] class several students had opted to buy paper copies of the books for some of the readings…They immediately perceived the cumbersome note-taking features and the lack of reliable pagination… The experimental project has uncovered faults so fundamental that this particular device will never be deployed for mass use by UW–Madison students.” (See Not So Fast, Guv! Wisconsin Students Not Ready to Terminate Paper Books.)

Results are now coming in on the DX from such schools as University of Washington, University of Virginia, Princeton and Reed College, a small campus in Oregon.  Typical were these observations by some students who “complained they couldn’t scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages or fully appreciate color charts and graphics,” writes Seattle Times business reporter Amy Martinez. One graduate student commented that “You don’t read textbooks in the same linear way as a novel. You have to flip back and forth between pages, and the Kindle is too slow for that. Also, the bookmarking function is buggy.”

Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps was less generous. She simply declared the DX “a dud.”

Here’s one anecdote reported by Martinez:

“Wary of lugging a backpack full of textbooks on the University of Washington campus, Franzi Roesner couldn’t wait to get her hands on a new, lightweight e-reader from Amazon.com. Soon after receiving a Kindle DX, however, something unexpected happened. Roesner began to miss thumbing through the pages of a printed textbook for the answer to a homework question. She felt relieved several months later when required reading for one of her classes was unavailable on the Kindle, freeing her to use a regular textbook.”

Educators are more sanguine about Apple’s iPad, but it may just be that it’s the screen medium itself, not the device, that turns students off.

Martinez’s coverage of the story can be read here.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Seattle Times.

It’s an accepted truth that in matters digital the British are a backwards people.  Their Internet competency trails that of Americans by a decade. With each instance of their technological quaintness we shake our heads and smile indulgently.

A recent poll confirms the archaic mentality of our cousins on the other side of the Big Pond. “Nearly three-quarters of Britons say that they will never totally migrate to a digital-only film or music subscription service,” reports Emma Barnett, Technology and Digital Media Correspondent for Telegraph.co.uk.  And “Seventy-three per cent of the Britons polled in a survey of over 1,000 consumers aged between 16 and 60 said that they could never see a time when they would move over to a 100 per cent digital-only music or film subscription model.” Another example of their antediluvian mindset: Given a choice, 75% of those polled would rather boot up a DVD than watch a streamed movie.

Most egregious of all is that 95% of those responding to the poll said that they prefer paper books over e-books.  Well, that tears it! If there is a more benighted race on the face of 21st century Earth we don’t know about it.

We must try to understand the values underlying this British perversity if for no other reason than they might yield some sociological benefits.  But more importantly, once we understand them it will be easier to convert the British to modern American values and expand the export market for our Nooks, Kindles and iPads.  So, the question is, do the British know something about paper that we don’t know?

A clue may be gleaned in an observation imparted to the Telegraph reporter by Shaun Hobbs, Home Server manager for HP Personal Systems Group UK and Ireland: “In this technologically driven age,” says Hobbs, “it is easy to get carried away and think that everybody is embracing digital and leaving physical behind. Our survey shows that this isn’t the case. Britons are on an evolutionary journey with media still being bought on multiple formats and enjoyed using a variety of devices. We’re not yet ready to give up the old ways of purchasing media.”

In the spirit of openmindedness we’ll grant that there might be some value in the old media. Perhaps Hobbs has been following the research of social scientists like Sandra Aamodt, former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, who wrote that “people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent… Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read.”

Or maybe Hobbs had delved into observations by Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, about the possibly negative impact of screen reading on children:  “No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain… My greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).”

Or Hobbs might have read a comment by Professor Gloria Mark, a University of California professor who studies human-computer interaction: “I’d much rather curl up in an easy chair with a paper book. It’s not only an escape into a world of literature but it’s an escape from my digital devices.”

Okay, we’re ready to concede  that digital books may be less immersive than printed ones, that they are far more distracting, that they may compromise reading speed, concentration and retentiveness in children, and that they are less beautiful, tactile and comfortable than paper.   But surely those drawbacks are not too high a price to pay for opening the lucrative British market to Yankee reading devices and an American way of life that is unquestionably the quintessence of civilization. American manufacturers simply must work harder to bring truth and e-books to this primordial, childlike society.

Richard Curtis

“What might at first seem an arcane matter — precisely when to put a movie for sale on cable systems and at what price — has been the subject of ferocious debate in a film industry that so far has stopped just short of embracing the digital revolution.”

Does that sound familiar to you? Denizens of the publishing industry will recognize the answer instantly: It’s about “windowing” movies.

While the book industry debates the timing of e-book releases of print books, movie companies are trying to figure out the best timing for cable release of theatrical motion pictures. A big difference between the two industries, however, is that the movie business now has US government “permission to activate technology to protect new releases from being copied if they were sold through video-on-demand systems before being issued on DVD.” This according to Michael Cieply of the New York Times.

Cieply writes that the Federal Communications Commission okayed technology called ’selectable output control’ that “can reach into a customer’s home video player and turn off its video outputs while a pay-per-view program is being watched, to prevent the program from being copied.”

The technology reflects the ire of movie theater owners “who have been fiercely protective of the exclusive period during which they have customarily served up the major studio pictures,” the Times article explains.

You can easily replace the players in this story with “Publishers”, “Authors”, ” E-Books” and “E-book Retailers.  The difference is, the book industry doesn’t have “selectable output control” to regulate windowing – bookbiz-ese for withholding – release of e-books, either legitimate ones or the pirated version.

Read details in Filmmakers Tread Softly on Early Release to Cable

RC