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Kay Cunningham's List: Books and Reading
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Jul 14, 15
'Three in ten adults read an e-book last year; half own a tablet or e-reader'
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Though e-books are rising in popularity, print remains the foundation of Americans’ reading habits. Most people who read e-books also read print books, and just 4% of readers are “e-book only.”
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Overall, 76% of adults read a book in some format over the previous 12 months. The typical American adult read or listened to 5 books in the past year, and the average for all adults was 12 books.1 Neither the mean nor median number of books read has changed significantly over the past few years.
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May 12, 15
'Some statistics before going further: in households where the family income is $30,000 or less in the United States, only 54% have access to broadband at home. For those who make under $20,000 a year (which is the rough poverty line for families of three), 1/3 — 33% — do not go online at all. Spend a little time with this Guardian write-up of the PEW research about internet access in the US, especially for how it impacts teens and kids. It’s eye-opening reading for those who have never spent time in a library or classroom, though those of us who have will find nothing surprising here. We know it because we’ve see it and our hands our tied.'
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And what about those kids who go to the library to use the computers? Chances are greater than zero they’re there to do homework and research on those time-limited computers, not access ebooks to read on a screen. Kids and teens are not going to go to the library to read these digital books If they’re able to get to the library at all — itself a challenge for low-income families due to the cost of transportation, the need for people to be working, the way hours work at public libraries that already put limits on these stretched-to-the-max families, the pesky need to have an identification, the restrictions likely placed on the under-18 crowd when it comes to borrowing digital devices (due to liability and replacement costs) — they’re there to get work done for school.
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Oct 08, 14
'When we turn to library ebooks, what we find is a vast array of substandard choices, and the lack of standardization means that readers have to figure out and adjust to every new platform. That might be okay if all the platforms were excellent, but they’re not. All of them seem to have accidental or deliberate ways to make the reading experience poorer.'
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This standardization problem has mostly been solved by academic ejournals. Most ejournals offer their articles in PDF format. Sure, there are still journals that don’t consider reading on a small screen, like the ones that still use two-column formatting, but for the most part if you download an article you know what you’re getting every time, just like picking up a book
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Ebrary is a popular one. I’ve never managed to read an entire ebook on the website itself because the reader always seems slow and clunky. It’s true that some Ebrary books can be downloaded into the easier-to-read Adobe Digital Editions application. The first time you can do it in 18 easy steps. After going through those 18 steps, you may then download the book into Adobe Digital Editions for two weeks, which is considerably less than the checkout time for most of the print books in my library’s collection for any class of library users.
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Aug 20, 14
' Paul wanted to talk about print versus electronic course materials. He works at Brigham Young University (BYU) and had noticed a trend on campus in which faculty are no longer printing course packs, but instead are allowing students to download files.'
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65% said they preferred print.
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When asked if they learn better from print or digital course materials, 74% reported print.
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Aug 20, 14
'Of the 527 respondents, two-thirds of which have used both e-textbooks and printed version, 57% said they prefer print. Only 21% of those polled favor the e-version. The remaining 21% stated that they prefer both formats.'
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The preference for print was also much higher—at 62%—in the 18- to 35-year-old bracket, which account for 75% of the respondents
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At the same time, the push for library e-lending should not grow at the expense of print as students do not favor e-textbooks as much as most had thought.
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Dec 22, 13
'Survey finds that 62% of 16 to 24-year-olds prefer traditional books over their digital equivalents'
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Oct 14, 13
' "Consortial Book Circulation Patterns: The OCLC-OhioLINK Study" provides an interpretation of the book circulation patterns from the OhioLINK consortium and OCLC Research study. The article is scheduled for publication in the November 2014 issue of College and Research Libraries but a preprint [pdf] is available now.
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Jun 06, 12
'In April 2003 the BBC's Big Read began the search for the nation's best-loved novel, and we asked you to nominate your favourite books.'
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Jan 11, 12
'This gallery presents the covers of 'the Hobbit' from around the globe, arranged by the year of publication. In here no English or American editions are presented; only the covers of translations of 'the Hobbit' from all different countries are shown.'
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Aug 31, 11
'We're attempting to help you find books with similar themes and writing style to books you've enjoyed in the past - comparing elements like Description, Pacing, Density, Perspective, and Dialog - while at the same time allowing you to specify details like... more Medieval Weapons.
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Aug 31, 11
'the Book Genome Project was created to identify, track, measure, and study the multitude of features that make up a book. Components such as language, character, and theme are mined and analyzed in order to sift, organize, categorize and ultimately separate one book from another in a crowded and complex "bookosphere."'
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Aug 11, 11
'The winners of NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy survey are an intriguing mix of classic and contemporary titles. '
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Aug 02, 11
"latest book “Welcome to the Fifth Estate: How to Create and Sustain a Winning Social Media Strategy,” discusses influencer theory in detail, including a section on the history of influencer theory on the social Web. Since drafting that material, leaderboard debate about quantifying influence has dramatically shaped the conversation on influencer theory. This post looks at the state of influencer theory on the social Web...."
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Jun 06, 11
'Internet Archive is building a physical archive for the long term preservation of one copy of every book, record, and movie we are able to attract or acquire. Because we expect day-to-day access to these materials to occur through digital means, the our physical archive is designed for long-term preservation of materials with only occasional, collection-scale retrieval. Because of this, we can create optimized environments for physical preservation and organizational structures that facilitate appropriate access. A seed bank might be conceptually closest to what we have in mind: storing important objects in safe ways to be used for redundancy, authority, and in case of catastrophe.'
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May 23, 11
'Brian O’Leary just finished presenting on e-reading at today’s NISO Forum on Mobile Technologies in Libraries, being held in Philadelphia. For those of us who couldn’t attend to hear Brian, his slides were kindly posted by NISO. '
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May 16, 11
'The University of Michigan Library’s Copyright Office is launching the first serious effort to identify orphan works among the in-copyright holdings of the HathiTrust Digital Library, which is funding the project.'
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This first phase of the orphan works identification project will develop procedures that can eventually be used by other HathiTrust partner institutions to expedite a task that will ultimately require the hand-checking of millions of volumes
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Mar 28, 11
'Edwards, who is Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering, is also the founding director of two "artscience labs": Le Laboratoire, in Paris, and the Idea Translation Lab at Harvard. Both are predicated on the notion that "the core of creativity" is the "fused process of artscience" -- that is, the natural progression through which we translate new ideas into reality, drawing on both aesthetic and analytical thinking. So Edwards writes in his new book, The Lab: Creativity and Culture (Harvard University Press). Roughly speaking, Le Laboratoire is a sort of public scientific laboratory with a focus on art and design, while the Idea Translation Lab adds a higher education emphasis in bringing this model to Harvard students and faculty.'
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