Oped by Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow in SEED magazine
see below
posted by dan at 9:48 PM
2 comments
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Oped by Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow in SEED magazine
Nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today’s modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow's.
by Denis G. Pelli & Charles Bigelow / October 20, 2009
Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
Number of authors who published in each year for various media since 1400 by century (left) and by year (right). Our prediction for the imminent future appears as the extrapolation of the Twitter-author curve (dashed line). The horizontal scale of time has one grid line per century (left) or per year (right). The first blog appeared in 1997; Facebook was launched in 2004; Twitter, in 2006. Note that the colored curves on the right have roughly the same steepness as the black curve on the left, despite the hundred-fold increase in the time scale between left and right. This indicates that the new media are growing 100 times faster than books. The book-authors line is not really broken; it’s still growing at the same old rate, tenfold per century, but looks flat when plotted by year. The vertical scale is number of authors per year, as a count (left) or percent of the world’s population (right). The logarithmic vertical scaling, increasing by powers of 10, displays growth clearly because the same percentage increase is always represented by the same upward shift on the graph. Plotted with this scaling, many growth phenomena, including epidemics, produce straight lines, which are particularly easy to recognize and describe. (Click here for methodology and full list of sources.)
But does increasing authorship matter? And is this increase a blip or a signpost? Authorship has risen steeply before. The period of the first steep rise, near 1500, coincides with the discovery of the New World and Protestantism, which saw the publication of the first vernacular Bible, translated by Martin Luther. The second, near 1800, includes the Industrial Revolution and its backlash, Romanticism. The current rise is much steeper.
Today, at 0.1 percent authorship, many people are trading privacy for influence. What will it mean when we hit nearly 1 percent next year and nearly 10 percent the year after as the current growth predicts? Governments, businesses, and organizations must adapt to a population that wields increasing individual power. Protestors used Twitter to discredit the election in Iran. When United Airlines refused to reimburse a musician for damaging his guitar, the offended customer posted a song online—“United Breaks Guitars”—and United’s stock dropped 10 percent.
Public discussion creates a social conscience. In July, Dawn Staley, University of South Carolina’s women’s basketball coach, complained on Twitter of rude service at her favorite pizza spot; the employee responsible was fired the next day. The judgment of the vice-chancellor of Buckingham University was widely questioned after he claimed that “curvy” female students are a “perk” of his job. For better or worse, as more people make public comments, we all share more thoughts and are more subject to public opinion.
In our analysis, we considered an author’s text “published” if 100 or more people read it. (Reaching 100 people may seem inconsequential, but new-media messages are often re-broadcast by recipients, and then by their recipients, and so on. In this way, a message can “go viral,” reaching millions.) Extrapolation of the Twitter-author curve (the dashed line) predicts that every person will publish in 2013. That is the ceiling: 100 percent participation. Provided current growth continues, the prediction of imminence is robust. Increasing the stringency of the criterion for “publishing” from 100 to 1,000 readers would reduce new-media authorship tenfold, but merely delays the predicted 100 percent participation by a year under this model.
International concern for the minority who can’t read may soon extend to those who can’t publish. Reading—a defining characteristic of civilization as far back as ancient Greece when all Athenian citizens were expected to know how to read—is now taken for granted in industrialized democracies. Publishing by the few Athenian authors brought us drama, philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, and history. As readers, we consume. As authors, we create. Our society is changing from consumers to creators.
Denis G. Pelli is professor of psychology and neural science at New York University and co-inventor of the Pelli-Robson contrast sensitivity chart. Charles Bigelow is the Carey Distinguished Professor of Graphic Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a MacArthur Foundation prize fellow, and co-designer of the widely used Lucida font.
by Denis G. Pelli & Charles Bigelow / October 20, 2009
Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
Number of authors who published in each year for various media since 1400 by century (left) and by year (right). Our prediction for the imminent future appears as the extrapolation of the Twitter-author curve (dashed line). The horizontal scale of time has one grid line per century (left) or per year (right). The first blog appeared in 1997; Facebook was launched in 2004; Twitter, in 2006. Note that the colored curves on the right have roughly the same steepness as the black curve on the left, despite the hundred-fold increase in the time scale between left and right. This indicates that the new media are growing 100 times faster than books. The book-authors line is not really broken; it’s still growing at the same old rate, tenfold per century, but looks flat when plotted by year. The vertical scale is number of authors per year, as a count (left) or percent of the world’s population (right). The logarithmic vertical scaling, increasing by powers of 10, displays growth clearly because the same percentage increase is always represented by the same upward shift on the graph. Plotted with this scaling, many growth phenomena, including epidemics, produce straight lines, which are particularly easy to recognize and describe. (Click here for methodology and full list of sources.)
But does increasing authorship matter? And is this increase a blip or a signpost? Authorship has risen steeply before. The period of the first steep rise, near 1500, coincides with the discovery of the New World and Protestantism, which saw the publication of the first vernacular Bible, translated by Martin Luther. The second, near 1800, includes the Industrial Revolution and its backlash, Romanticism. The current rise is much steeper.
Today, at 0.1 percent authorship, many people are trading privacy for influence. What will it mean when we hit nearly 1 percent next year and nearly 10 percent the year after as the current growth predicts? Governments, businesses, and organizations must adapt to a population that wields increasing individual power. Protestors used Twitter to discredit the election in Iran. When United Airlines refused to reimburse a musician for damaging his guitar, the offended customer posted a song online—“United Breaks Guitars”—and United’s stock dropped 10 percent.
Public discussion creates a social conscience. In July, Dawn Staley, University of South Carolina’s women’s basketball coach, complained on Twitter of rude service at her favorite pizza spot; the employee responsible was fired the next day. The judgment of the vice-chancellor of Buckingham University was widely questioned after he claimed that “curvy” female students are a “perk” of his job. For better or worse, as more people make public comments, we all share more thoughts and are more subject to public opinion.
In our analysis, we considered an author’s text “published” if 100 or more people read it. (Reaching 100 people may seem inconsequential, but new-media messages are often re-broadcast by recipients, and then by their recipients, and so on. In this way, a message can “go viral,” reaching millions.) Extrapolation of the Twitter-author curve (the dashed line) predicts that every person will publish in 2013. That is the ceiling: 100 percent participation. Provided current growth continues, the prediction of imminence is robust. Increasing the stringency of the criterion for “publishing” from 100 to 1,000 readers would reduce new-media authorship tenfold, but merely delays the predicted 100 percent participation by a year under this model.
International concern for the minority who can’t read may soon extend to those who can’t publish. Reading—a defining characteristic of civilization as far back as ancient Greece when all Athenian citizens were expected to know how to read—is now taken for granted in industrialized democracies. Publishing by the few Athenian authors brought us drama, philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, and history. As readers, we consume. As authors, we create. Our society is changing from consumers to creators.
Denis G. Pelli is professor of psychology and neural science at New York University and co-inventor of the Pelli-Robson contrast sensitivity chart. Charles Bigelow is the Carey Distinguished Professor of Graphic Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a MacArthur Foundation prize fellow, and co-designer of the widely used Lucida font.
posted by dan at 9:45 PM
0 comments
The future of reading -- academic conference June 9 - 12, 2010
Details coming soon:
On June 9-12, 2010, there will be a conference at a major US university on the east coast in upstate New York titled "The Future of Reading". They have invited speakers from a
broad range of fields, including vision science, type design,
publishing, e-books, writing systems, history of print,
and other areas. More details will be available when they
launch their webssite next month.
bookmark the date! Be there, if you can! I can't, but I will be there in spirit.
danny
On June 9-12, 2010, there will be a conference at a major US university on the east coast in upstate New York titled "The Future of Reading". They have invited speakers from a
broad range of fields, including vision science, type design,
publishing, e-books, writing systems, history of print,
and other areas. More details will be available when they
launch their webssite next month.
bookmark the date! Be there, if you can! I can't, but I will be there in spirit.
danny
posted by dan at 9:41 PM
0 comments
Friday, October 30, 2009
the Kindle is to books what paying to watch a movie in streaming format on the internet is to film.
Jmark on another blog notes:
"I’ve owned a Kindle reader (first generation) since the first month it came out. Initially, I was enthusiastic and used it constantly. Now, I only use it when I am reading a very large book that I would rather not lug around in my workbag (I’m reading U.S. Grant’s “Memoirs” and Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”).
I much prefer reading something in book form (I would never think of reading the triumvirate of great Stoic classics (and my favorite books), Marcus Aurelius’ meditations, Epictetus, and Seneca’s essays, on a Kindle: my notes and underlinings are too important to me.
I also cannot imagine being without these books during some interruption in electricity (I live in Florida and hurricanes have knocked out my electric for weeks on end).
It’s taken time to come to this conclusion, but I think that the Kindle is good only for ephemeral reading: the daily paper, a light novel, a mystery.
Something valuable that requires study and mental application to fully appreciate? No way.
The experience of making a book a personal possession (with markings, notes, etc.,) is missing with the Kindle experience.
I own the Kindle; I do not own the books it carries in digital format in any palpable sense. One button click and –whooosh—they are gone. No Kindle book can be handed on to the next generation; they exist only in Amazon’s server.
I think this gadget is useful for some things but that it is inadequate for others.
An analogy: the Kindle is to books what paying to watch a movie in streaming format on the internet is to film.
When I find a film I love, I will want a copy on DVD. With the Kindle, there is a sense that I am only renting or borrowing a book. Yes, I know that I could download it again from Amazon if my Kindle were to break, but these are books that I can never display in my home, stack on the shelves in my library, etc."
"I’ve owned a Kindle reader (first generation) since the first month it came out. Initially, I was enthusiastic and used it constantly. Now, I only use it when I am reading a very large book that I would rather not lug around in my workbag (I’m reading U.S. Grant’s “Memoirs” and Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”).
I much prefer reading something in book form (I would never think of reading the triumvirate of great Stoic classics (and my favorite books), Marcus Aurelius’ meditations, Epictetus, and Seneca’s essays, on a Kindle: my notes and underlinings are too important to me.
I also cannot imagine being without these books during some interruption in electricity (I live in Florida and hurricanes have knocked out my electric for weeks on end).
It’s taken time to come to this conclusion, but I think that the Kindle is good only for ephemeral reading: the daily paper, a light novel, a mystery.
Something valuable that requires study and mental application to fully appreciate? No way.
The experience of making a book a personal possession (with markings, notes, etc.,) is missing with the Kindle experience.
I own the Kindle; I do not own the books it carries in digital format in any palpable sense. One button click and –whooosh—they are gone. No Kindle book can be handed on to the next generation; they exist only in Amazon’s server.
I think this gadget is useful for some things but that it is inadequate for others.
An analogy: the Kindle is to books what paying to watch a movie in streaming format on the internet is to film.
When I find a film I love, I will want a copy on DVD. With the Kindle, there is a sense that I am only renting or borrowing a book. Yes, I know that I could download it again from Amazon if my Kindle were to break, but these are books that I can never display in my home, stack on the shelves in my library, etc."
posted by dan at 9:30 PM
1 comments
Klaus Nielsen - student in Book History and Literary Theory -
From: Klaus Nielsen
Subject: Re: forms of reading on paper and reading on screens
This topic is truly an interesting read (or ''scread''). But it seems to me
that the problem might better be approached from a different angle than
the current focus on the reader's perception of print vs. screen or
other media. The crux of the difference between the two types of reading
is not receptive, sensory or cognitive ....but material.
When we read something on screen there's a divide between the media
that the text is stored upon and the media that transcribes or
transposes the stored text to the reader in a way that makes reading (or
hearing etc.) possible. We cannot read a PDF file. It would be a
nonsensical jumble of zeros and ones if we were able to pull it out of
its storage media (e.g. the hard drive or USB stick etc.) so to speak.
The same applies for audio CDs or vinyl LPs, MP3 files and the likes.
In the book, we have convergence of storage media (or storage device) and
display media. It's a two-in-one solution! We can pick it up anywhere
and granted we can read the letters printed on its pages and understand
the language we can read anywhere. Reading electronic texts (or
listening to any kind of audio book whether MP3, CD or cassette tapes)
requires a machine (a computer or an e-reader) that can translate the
stored information into a display text that we can perceive. So the
difference is not so much our perception of text but the divorce of
storage and display media and the removal of the reader from the
materiality of reading.
I'm not sure about the correctness of the terms "storage" and
"display media". There are probably a great variety of terms for the
same distinction within Library Science or other bibliographical
enterprises dealing specifically with electronic texts. Corrections and
suggestions are much welcomed.
I enjoy reading these discussions on topics related to the electronic
media. They seem to generate strong feelings and numerous contributions.
I've printed them all out to PDF files. There's another discrepancy
between material and immaterial terminology: print-to-file. Usually
printing meant producing a material object, a piece of paper or a book.
But I won't propose that a change in terminology on this aspect is
needed.
Best regards
KN
Ph.d.-student in Book History and Literary Theory
Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics
University of Copenhagen
Denmark
Subject: Re: forms of reading on paper and reading on screens
This topic is truly an interesting read (or ''scread''). But it seems to me
that the problem might better be approached from a different angle than
the current focus on the reader's perception of print vs. screen or
other media. The crux of the difference between the two types of reading
is not receptive, sensory or cognitive ....but material.
When we read something on screen there's a divide between the media
that the text is stored upon and the media that transcribes or
transposes the stored text to the reader in a way that makes reading (or
hearing etc.) possible. We cannot read a PDF file. It would be a
nonsensical jumble of zeros and ones if we were able to pull it out of
its storage media (e.g. the hard drive or USB stick etc.) so to speak.
The same applies for audio CDs or vinyl LPs, MP3 files and the likes.
In the book, we have convergence of storage media (or storage device) and
display media. It's a two-in-one solution! We can pick it up anywhere
and granted we can read the letters printed on its pages and understand
the language we can read anywhere. Reading electronic texts (or
listening to any kind of audio book whether MP3, CD or cassette tapes)
requires a machine (a computer or an e-reader) that can translate the
stored information into a display text that we can perceive. So the
difference is not so much our perception of text but the divorce of
storage and display media and the removal of the reader from the
materiality of reading.
I'm not sure about the correctness of the terms "storage" and
"display media". There are probably a great variety of terms for the
same distinction within Library Science or other bibliographical
enterprises dealing specifically with electronic texts. Corrections and
suggestions are much welcomed.
I enjoy reading these discussions on topics related to the electronic
media. They seem to generate strong feelings and numerous contributions.
I've printed them all out to PDF files. There's another discrepancy
between material and immaterial terminology: print-to-file. Usually
printing meant producing a material object, a piece of paper or a book.
But I won't propose that a change in terminology on this aspect is
needed.
Best regards
KN
Ph.d.-student in Book History and Literary Theory
Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics
University of Copenhagen
Denmark
posted by dan at 9:12 PM
0 comments
Paul T. McCain, publisher, on reading and, uh, er, "screading".... pro and con. What's YOUR take on all this?
Paul T. McCain blogs today:
"Dr. Gene Edward Veith had a fascinating blog post today, October 28, well, fascinating to me at least. Perhaps you too? (YES!)
Listen, I’m a publisher and I know all about trends in e-books. They represent the fastest growing type of “books” being sold today, hands down. And by fast, I mean, triple digit growth rates in quantities sold, as opposed to negative double digit decreases in nearly every other type of genre, at least according to the most recent data released by the Association of American Publishers, which I am legally not able to share with you, but take my word for it.
It’s dramatic; however .......[and in life, there's always a "however"], ...
for me the experience of total “mind immersion” in a book is much greater than an e-book.
A book I can hold in my hands, skin on paper, not skin on plastic. I can underline. I can write notes. I can jot stars, or exclamation points in the margins. I can instantly flip around in the book. So far, no e-reader I’ve seen remotely replicates the experience of reading a book. I don’t mind reading fiction on an e-reader, but anything serious, that I want to “inwardly digest,” must be a real book.
There is a great blog post article by Mark Bauerlen of Emory University at his Brainstorm blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education in DC that speaks to the difference between “screading” [reading on screen] as opposed to reading-reading."
from Cranach: The Blog of Veith:
"Dr. Gene Edward Veith had a fascinating blog post today, October 28, well, fascinating to me at least. Perhaps you too? (YES!)
Listen, I’m a publisher and I know all about trends in e-books. They represent the fastest growing type of “books” being sold today, hands down. And by fast, I mean, triple digit growth rates in quantities sold, as opposed to negative double digit decreases in nearly every other type of genre, at least according to the most recent data released by the Association of American Publishers, which I am legally not able to share with you, but take my word for it.
It’s dramatic; however .......[and in life, there's always a "however"], ...
for me the experience of total “mind immersion” in a book is much greater than an e-book.
A book I can hold in my hands, skin on paper, not skin on plastic. I can underline. I can write notes. I can jot stars, or exclamation points in the margins. I can instantly flip around in the book. So far, no e-reader I’ve seen remotely replicates the experience of reading a book. I don’t mind reading fiction on an e-reader, but anything serious, that I want to “inwardly digest,” must be a real book.
There is a great blog post article by Mark Bauerlen of Emory University at his Brainstorm blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education in DC that speaks to the difference between “screading” [reading on screen] as opposed to reading-reading."
from Cranach: The Blog of Veith:
posted by dan at 9:05 PM
0 comments
I'd say that reading on a screen *can* be qualititatively different than reading on paper.....
"I'd say that reading on a screen *can* be qualititatively different than
reading as we have understood it, but does not necessarily have to be.
I've
read narrative book-like material almost exclusively on screens for ten
years and I am seldom distracted by links.
I focus on the text, particularly
with e-books.
But I know what you mean; different experiences are certainly
possible and are becoming widespread and it is something different than what
we have always called "reading" when you use a basic text more as a jumping
off point than as a narrative."
Mike
reading as we have understood it, but does not necessarily have to be.
I've
read narrative book-like material almost exclusively on screens for ten
years and I am seldom distracted by links.
I focus on the text, particularly
with e-books.
But I know what you mean; different experiences are certainly
possible and are becoming widespread and it is something different than what
we have always called "reading" when you use a basic text more as a jumping
off point than as a narrative."
Mike
posted by dan at 6:22 PM
0 comments
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Helping Grandma Get Her Tech On - by Eric A. Taub, New York Times
Nice story here: text by Eric Taub, NY Times
A few days before my 100-year-old mother’s death last summer, she said she had only one regret: not being able to see her family in California again.
But then I realized that I had my MacBook (with its built-in webcam) in my briefcase. A few phone calls later and my mother was using iChat to speak with and see her great-grandchildren for the first time in years.
My mother, born in a Belarussian village before the advent of commercial radio, was by her late 90s using a cellphone, receiving e-mail messages from her family and asking me “what is this Twitter thing anyway?”
She was far from the only centenarian using technology for more than just medical monitoring and protection against falls. Contrary to stereotypes, computers, social networks, e-mail and even video games are becoming essential parts of older peoples’ lives.
A few days before my 100-year-old mother’s death last summer, she said she had only one regret: not being able to see her family in California again.
But then I realized that I had my MacBook (with its built-in webcam) in my briefcase. A few phone calls later and my mother was using iChat to speak with and see her great-grandchildren for the first time in years.
My mother, born in a Belarussian village before the advent of commercial radio, was by her late 90s using a cellphone, receiving e-mail messages from her family and asking me “what is this Twitter thing anyway?”
She was far from the only centenarian using technology for more than just medical monitoring and protection against falls. Contrary to stereotypes, computers, social networks, e-mail and even video games are becoming essential parts of older peoples’ lives.
posted by dan at 11:19 PM
0 comments
A retronym will arise for its superceded equivalent.. - Marc Lawrence, former IT worker in Noosa Heads, says
Marc Lawrence in Australia tells me via an online forum:
RE: Do we need a new word for reading on screens?
"I think it more likely that, seeing as in the future we probably will read more often from a screen than from paper surfaces of books or newspapers or magazines...probably what will happen is that some word or term will evolve to encompass the action rather than the action evolving a new word, and a retronym will arise for its superceded equivalent (think "acoustic guitar" or "film camera"). .....Thus, reading will still be "reading", but reading a paper book may be...oh, I don't know, but likely as simple as the examples given...something like "pbook reading" or "paper reading". .......I guess we can hypothesize about future words, but I suspect we'll no more control or even steer it than we do most developments and evolutions and contributions to language - it just happens. doesn't it?"
WELL SAID, SIR. -- Danny
RE: Do we need a new word for reading on screens?
"I think it more likely that, seeing as in the future we probably will read more often from a screen than from paper surfaces of books or newspapers or magazines...probably what will happen is that some word or term will evolve to encompass the action rather than the action evolving a new word, and a retronym will arise for its superceded equivalent (think "acoustic guitar" or "film camera"). .....Thus, reading will still be "reading", but reading a paper book may be...oh, I don't know, but likely as simple as the examples given...something like "pbook reading" or "paper reading". .......I guess we can hypothesize about future words, but I suspect we'll no more control or even steer it than we do most developments and evolutions and contributions to language - it just happens. doesn't it?"
WELL SAID, SIR. -- Danny
posted by dan at 10:23 PM
0 comments
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Prime View International (PVI), Scott Liu and E-Ink: story coming soon!
Am thinking about doing a story on Prime View International inside the Hsinchu Science Park in Taiwan, just "down the road a bit" from where I live. My editors in NYC want me to look into the following issues:
"We'd love to see you talk to PVI people -- and CEO Scott Liu -- about the future of the E-Ink technology and where they expect to see E-Ink and the like 5 years from now. AND: What's ahead re color and full motion video? What companies is PVI aligned with now? Any biz arrangements that could affect the kinds of readers we'll soon see? Is PVI worried about competing technologies, such as Pixel Qi, which will let the same screen operate in either an E-Ink-style mode or an LCD-ish color mode? ALSO: descriptions of the PVI workplace in Hsinchu. What's it like to work there at PVI for employees? What are the sights and sounds of the production line? History of the company?
ALSO: Just who is behind PVI, in addition to Scott Liu, the CEO, and what are their backgrounds? Who controls PVI? How much of the technology comes from the company itself, and how much through acquisitions? Does PVI now entirely own E Ink? Or is it still owned by the firm in Boston that came up with the idea at MIT?"
THE FULL REPORT will appear HERE soon.
"We'd love to see you talk to PVI people -- and CEO Scott Liu -- about the future of the E-Ink technology and where they expect to see E-Ink and the like 5 years from now. AND: What's ahead re color and full motion video? What companies is PVI aligned with now? Any biz arrangements that could affect the kinds of readers we'll soon see? Is PVI worried about competing technologies, such as Pixel Qi, which will let the same screen operate in either an E-Ink-style mode or an LCD-ish color mode? ALSO: descriptions of the PVI workplace in Hsinchu. What's it like to work there at PVI for employees? What are the sights and sounds of the production line? History of the company?
ALSO: Just who is behind PVI, in addition to Scott Liu, the CEO, and what are their backgrounds? Who controls PVI? How much of the technology comes from the company itself, and how much through acquisitions? Does PVI now entirely own E Ink? Or is it still owned by the firm in Boston that came up with the idea at MIT?"
THE FULL REPORT will appear HERE soon.
posted by dan at 8:34 PM
0 comments
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Danny Bloom says he's on a crusade to find a new word for "reading" on "computer screens and Kindle and Nook screens" - other than "reading", that is
Lone blogger in Taiwan on quixotic quest to find new word for "reading on screens"
by Biko Lang, Staff Writer (bikolang@gmailcom)
The New York Daily Times
NEW YORK (Novemeber 1, 3009) -- Danny Bloom says he's on a crusade to find a new word for "reading" on "computer screens and Kindle and Nook screens" -- other than "reading", that is! -- and so far he's met nothing but opposition and roadblocks along the way.
But that has not stopped the lone blogger in Taiwan from his quixotic quest. He says he's pushing forward with his public crusade, step by step, despite the many setbacks, adding: "Sometimes I feel this is like pushing a heavy stone up a steep hill, only to have it roll back a few feet every time we advance a few inches."
"Very few people in the education and technology fields agree with me on this novel idea, but I remain determined," Bloom says. "In fact, a few experts and forecasters around the country have told me privately that this crusade is worth it, if only to start a national discussion on the future of reading and the future of E-readers. So I am soldiering on, inspired by their encouragement. This is not about me, this is about the future of reading, and the future of civilization."
Reading on screens is a whole new ballgame, Bloom contends, and he believes our culture needs a new word for this new human activity.
"It is more than just reading," he says. "On a screen, you scroll, you link, you see photos and videos, you use a mouse or buttons on a Kindle, and then of course, you read, as the literary agent Richard Curtis recently said on his blog. This is uber-reading. This is reading-plus-one. So I feel we need a new word for this, although I have no idea what that word will be in the end, because as many people have told me in the past year, new words happen organically and naturally, when the time is right, and when the need becomes more than apparent. So this is all just to jumpstart the discussion."
Bloom, a graduate of Tufts in Boston, says he reads on both paper surfaces and screens every day, and he loves both. One is not a priori better or worse than the other, just different, he adds, echoing the words of futurist Paul Saffo in San Francisco, who told him that in a recent email.
Some people online have suggested such words as "screening" and "screading", Bloom says, adding: "Who knows which words we will adopt for this or when? I have no idea. I just like thinking about it now, and when the time is right, the new words or terms will come. One blogger told me we might even need two words for this, one for reading on computer screens, which are backlit, and another for reading on e-readers like the Kindle or the Nook, which use E-Ink for the screens.
Bloom said he's open to all suggestions for the new words, and says he's patient while at the same time steadfast and committed to this seeminly impossible crusade. "Patience is my middle name," he says, with a chuckle.
Suggestions for this lone name-crusader in Taiwan? All ideas are welcome, Bloom says, who says readers may send in their nominations to him at bikolang@gmail.com on his email connection.
posted by dan at 7:34 PM
1 comments
Recently Danny Bloom told the MEDIALOPER blog's editor Kirk that we might need or find useful a new word for READING on paper VS reading on screens
Recently Danny Bloom told the MEDIALOPER blog's editor Kirk that we might need or find useful a new word for READING on paper surfaces VS reading on screens, and listed two words that have already been suggested to him by interested observers: screening, and screading.
Kirk wrote back to him to say: "Thanks Danny. You make an interesting point. I tend to think the word will
have to evolve organically as digital reading environments evolve. If for
no other reason, because not all screens are the same. Reading on a
computer is obviously different from reading a printed book. But what about
an eInk display? That experience is different from both a book and a
computer. We may need more than one more word to describe all of the
different types of reading we'll have in the future."
And then Danny replied to Kirk: "yes, you are right, and I agree, ---- screen reading is diff for
computer screens and E-Ink screens and with many gadgets out there now
and more soon, we might need MORE than just one new word....and YES,
it must happen organically and naturally, we cannot just coin a word
and make it stick...and i agree.......But the time to start thinking
and talking about these new terms and tossing sample ideas around is
NOW........but the new word or terms won't really HAPPEN until they
are meant to happen, maybe 10 years from now, maybe 2025, but they
will happen....MAYBE.....reading IS reading, and maybe the word
READING will remain but with new meanings....Esther Dyson told me
that! CAN YOU BLOG ON THIS IDEA, what I said, what you said, and ask
readers to say what they want to say about this..JUST to keep the
discussions going? Maybe ask readers of your blog: what do THEY think
about new words for
screen reading
Kindle reading
Nook reading
etc.
did you know KINDLING is already a verb at www.UrbanDictionary.com and
also NOOKING, too., go look
Kirk wrote back to him to say: "Thanks Danny. You make an interesting point. I tend to think the word will
have to evolve organically as digital reading environments evolve. If for
no other reason, because not all screens are the same. Reading on a
computer is obviously different from reading a printed book. But what about
an eInk display? That experience is different from both a book and a
computer. We may need more than one more word to describe all of the
different types of reading we'll have in the future."
And then Danny replied to Kirk: "yes, you are right, and I agree, ---- screen reading is diff for
computer screens and E-Ink screens and with many gadgets out there now
and more soon, we might need MORE than just one new word....and YES,
it must happen organically and naturally, we cannot just coin a word
and make it stick...and i agree.......But the time to start thinking
and talking about these new terms and tossing sample ideas around is
NOW........but the new word or terms won't really HAPPEN until they
are meant to happen, maybe 10 years from now, maybe 2025, but they
will happen....MAYBE.....reading IS reading, and maybe the word
READING will remain but with new meanings....Esther Dyson told me
that! CAN YOU BLOG ON THIS IDEA, what I said, what you said, and ask
readers to say what they want to say about this..JUST to keep the
discussions going? Maybe ask readers of your blog: what do THEY think
about new words for
screen reading
Kindle reading
Nook reading
etc.
did you know KINDLING is already a verb at www.UrbanDictionary.com and
also NOOKING, too., go look
posted by dan at 7:03 PM
0 comments
Monday, October 26, 2009
ARE YOU SCREADING?
[Thanks to Keira at NCYU for taking this photo on October 26, 2009.-
posted by dan at 7:25 AM
0 comments
Stop Your Search Engines, writes Peggy Orenstein in the pages of the New York Times
Peggy Orenstein notes:
"Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses lashed himself to his ship’s mast to avoid succumbing to the Sirens’ song. In my case, though, the irresistible temptation was the Internet. But before I began, I wondered about the genesis of the term “self-binding.” So I hopped online and found Jon Elster, a professor of political science at Columbia University, whose book “Ulysses Unbound” explores whether voluntarily restricting your choices enhances or curtails freedom.
That reminded me: I hadn’t read “The Odyssey” since college, and because I was pretty sure that my copy was at the bottom of a carton of books in faraway Minneapolis, I Googled the original text. I browsed several versions before downloading what seemed like the best translation. Because my interest lay specifically with the Sirens (quick Web break to make sure that should be uppercase), I sifted through a variety of classicists’ interpretations of their role. Then — and this seemed reasonable enough — I searched for the “Sirens” episode in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” I can’t quite recollect how I got to the video for the song “Sirens,” by the alternative rock group AVA, but that put me in mind of Blink-182 (with whom AVA shares a frontman), so I clicked over to that band’s site to check for any updates on the release of its new album, then watched its reunion performance from February’s Grammy Awards. . . . When I looked up, three and a half hours had passed.
And that is why I need the mast. It came in the form of an app called Freedom, which blocks your Internet access for up to eight hours at a stretch. The only way to get back online is to reboot your computer, which — though not as foolproof as, say, removing the modem entirely and overnighting it to yourself (another strategy I’ve contemplated) — is cumbersome and humiliating enough to be an effective deterrent. The program was developed by Fred Stutzman, a graduate student in information and library science, whose own failsafe self-binding technique — writing at a cafe without Internet access — came undone when the place went wireless. “We’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud,” he told me. “I realized the only way to fight back was at an individual, personal level.”
Freedom, which runs only on Macs, is downloaded more than 4,000 times a month. Stutzman says this mass-erosion of our self-control was inevitable, as the instrument of our productivity merged with that of our distraction: since computers have expanded from mere business tools to full-service entertainment centers. But I think there’s something deeper going on as well. Those mythical bird-women (look it up) didn’t seduce with beauty or carnality — not with petty diversions — but with the promise of unending knowledge. “Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens,” they crooned to passing ships, vowing that any sailor who heeded their voices would emerge a “wiser man.” That is precisely the draw of the Internet.
It is heartening that the yearning for learning is the most powerful of all human cravings (though it applies equally to obtaining the wisdom of Zeus or the YouTube video on how to peel a banana like a monkey). Yet the sea surrounding the Sirens was littered with corpses. Can increased knowledge really destroy us?
Well, yes. According to Elster, there are certainly occasions when choosing ignorance could be smart. You might decline, for instance, to undergo testing for the genetic marker for Huntington’s disease, which is fatal and incurable. Or say you were an East German after reunification: would you want to read files that may show that your spouse had informed against you? As a culture, we have banned research on reproductive cloning, fearing how future generations might use the results.
In my slightly less agonizing situation, the trap is more of a bait and switch: the promise is of infinite knowledge, but what’s delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same. In that sense, Homer may have been the original neuropsychologist: centuries after his death, brain studies show that true learning is largely an unconscious process. If we’re inundated with data, our brains’ synthesizing functions are overwhelmed by the effort to keep up. And the original purpose — deeper knowledge of a subject — is lost, as surely as the corpses surrounding Sirenum scopuli.
It could be that sometimes our greatest freedom may be to choose freedom from freedom. I am still surprised by the relief that floods me whenever I bind myself from going online, when I have no option but to ignore the incessant tweets and e-mail messages and videos and news links and even the legitimate research.
I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones."
Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer, is the author of “Waiting for Daisy,” a memoir.
"Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses lashed himself to his ship’s mast to avoid succumbing to the Sirens’ song. In my case, though, the irresistible temptation was the Internet. But before I began, I wondered about the genesis of the term “self-binding.” So I hopped online and found Jon Elster, a professor of political science at Columbia University, whose book “Ulysses Unbound” explores whether voluntarily restricting your choices enhances or curtails freedom.
That reminded me: I hadn’t read “The Odyssey” since college, and because I was pretty sure that my copy was at the bottom of a carton of books in faraway Minneapolis, I Googled the original text. I browsed several versions before downloading what seemed like the best translation. Because my interest lay specifically with the Sirens (quick Web break to make sure that should be uppercase), I sifted through a variety of classicists’ interpretations of their role. Then — and this seemed reasonable enough — I searched for the “Sirens” episode in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” I can’t quite recollect how I got to the video for the song “Sirens,” by the alternative rock group AVA, but that put me in mind of Blink-182 (with whom AVA shares a frontman), so I clicked over to that band’s site to check for any updates on the release of its new album, then watched its reunion performance from February’s Grammy Awards. . . . When I looked up, three and a half hours had passed.
And that is why I need the mast. It came in the form of an app called Freedom, which blocks your Internet access for up to eight hours at a stretch. The only way to get back online is to reboot your computer, which — though not as foolproof as, say, removing the modem entirely and overnighting it to yourself (another strategy I’ve contemplated) — is cumbersome and humiliating enough to be an effective deterrent. The program was developed by Fred Stutzman, a graduate student in information and library science, whose own failsafe self-binding technique — writing at a cafe without Internet access — came undone when the place went wireless. “We’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud,” he told me. “I realized the only way to fight back was at an individual, personal level.”
Freedom, which runs only on Macs, is downloaded more than 4,000 times a month. Stutzman says this mass-erosion of our self-control was inevitable, as the instrument of our productivity merged with that of our distraction: since computers have expanded from mere business tools to full-service entertainment centers. But I think there’s something deeper going on as well. Those mythical bird-women (look it up) didn’t seduce with beauty or carnality — not with petty diversions — but with the promise of unending knowledge. “Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens,” they crooned to passing ships, vowing that any sailor who heeded their voices would emerge a “wiser man.” That is precisely the draw of the Internet.
It is heartening that the yearning for learning is the most powerful of all human cravings (though it applies equally to obtaining the wisdom of Zeus or the YouTube video on how to peel a banana like a monkey). Yet the sea surrounding the Sirens was littered with corpses. Can increased knowledge really destroy us?
Well, yes. According to Elster, there are certainly occasions when choosing ignorance could be smart. You might decline, for instance, to undergo testing for the genetic marker for Huntington’s disease, which is fatal and incurable. Or say you were an East German after reunification: would you want to read files that may show that your spouse had informed against you? As a culture, we have banned research on reproductive cloning, fearing how future generations might use the results.
In my slightly less agonizing situation, the trap is more of a bait and switch: the promise is of infinite knowledge, but what’s delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same. In that sense, Homer may have been the original neuropsychologist: centuries after his death, brain studies show that true learning is largely an unconscious process. If we’re inundated with data, our brains’ synthesizing functions are overwhelmed by the effort to keep up. And the original purpose — deeper knowledge of a subject — is lost, as surely as the corpses surrounding Sirenum scopuli.
It could be that sometimes our greatest freedom may be to choose freedom from freedom. I am still surprised by the relief that floods me whenever I bind myself from going online, when I have no option but to ignore the incessant tweets and e-mail messages and videos and news links and even the legitimate research.
I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones."
Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer, is the author of “Waiting for Daisy,” a memoir.
posted by dan at 12:01 AM
0 comments
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The Pocket Veto has become an accepted way of turning down ideas and submissions even from longtime contributors
Ben Yagado, ex-hack, wrote:
"A friend of mine, who never got
published in The New Yorker, still treasures the bunch of hand-typed
and personal rejection letters he got in the late '70s and early '80s
from William Shawn. That's so 20th century.
These days, you're lucky
to get a form letter. The pocket veto — that is, the unreturned e-mail,
letter, or phone call — has become an accepted way of turning down ideas
and submissions, even from longtime contributors.
A couple of months
ago, I sent, through my literary agent, a detailed query letter to a
magazine editor he had worked with before. We followed it up a couple
of times. No yes, no no, no nothing.
I'm done."
"A friend of mine, who never got
published in The New Yorker, still treasures the bunch of hand-typed
and personal rejection letters he got in the late '70s and early '80s
from William Shawn. That's so 20th century.
These days, you're lucky
to get a form letter. The pocket veto — that is, the unreturned e-mail,
letter, or phone call — has become an accepted way of turning down ideas
and submissions, even from longtime contributors.
A couple of months
ago, I sent, through my literary agent, a detailed query letter to a
magazine editor he had worked with before. We followed it up a couple
of times. No yes, no no, no nothing.
I'm done."
posted by dan at 11:43 PM
0 comments
Leon Neyfakh asks: "What part of "never email me again" was ambiguous?"
Leon Neyfakh to me
show details Oct 24, 3009 (14,567 days ago)
what part of "never email me again" was ambiguous?
--
Leon Neyfakh
The New York Observer
xxxxxx@observer.com
(2xxx12) xxxx 9xxx308
9xxxx15 Broadway, xxxx9th Floor
New York, NY xxxxx0
www.observer.com
www.twitter.com/newyorkobserver
show details Oct 24, 3009 (14,567 days ago)
what part of "never email me again" was ambiguous?
--
Leon Neyfakh
The New York Observer
xxxxxx@observer.com
(2xxx12) xxxx 9xxx308
9xxxx15 Broadway, xxxx9th Floor
New York, NY xxxxx0
www.observer.com
www.twitter.com/newyorkobserver
posted by dan at 11:41 PM
1 comments
Nooking is now a verb: see item No. 3 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nooking
Nooking is now a verb:
see item No. 3
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nooking
3. nooking
To read a book on a sleek, light e-reader device called a Nook and marketed by Barnes & Noble.
"Sorry, I can't talk to you now honey, I'm nooking the new Dan Brown book on my Nook and I just can't put it down!"
books e-readers e-books chapters bookstores
by playingnookie101 Oct 24, 2009 share this
see item No. 3
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nooking
3. nooking
To read a book on a sleek, light e-reader device called a Nook and marketed by Barnes & Noble.
"Sorry, I can't talk to you now honey, I'm nooking the new Dan Brown book on my Nook and I just can't put it down!"
books e-readers e-books chapters bookstores
by playingnookie101 Oct 24, 2009 share this
posted by dan at 11:27 PM
0 comments
AT LEAST YOU HAD HIGH SCHOOL - A Haiku - by Michael Joseph
yes i broke your heart
but at least you had high school.
most folk just have life.
haiku by Michael Joseph
Rutgers University Libraries
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
169 College Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
"Alas, if only we also had clarinets."
posted by dan at 10:54 PM
0 comments
Professor Steven Krashen on why books are important, and why e-readers are just approximations of the real thing
Professor Steven Krashen on why books are important, and why e-readers are just approximations of the real thing
In a recent comment at Huffington Post, Dr Krashen noted:
"Let me recommend another device for reading: It is random-access, highly portable, requires only natural, easily available energy, and is simple to use. You don't have to shut it down when the airline people tell you to turn off your electronic devices and put your tray table up.
These devices are already commercially available and can, in fact, be borrowed for free. They last for decades, even centuries, and no arbitrary changes are planned for the future. When using this device you don't have to call for help to find the right command when the screen goes blank or freezes, or get a new equipment every few months because your electronic reader is now obsolete and your electronic books unusable on the new readers.
The device is, of course, the book and its close relatives, the magazine, the comic book, and the graphic novel. Someday, electronic books will undoubtedly replace the book, but so far none of them has all the advantages of the book. Right now, they are only androids, approximations of the real thing."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-haber/the-future-of-reading-lea_b_330523.html
In a recent comment at Huffington Post, Dr Krashen noted:
"Let me recommend another device for reading: It is random-access, highly portable, requires only natural, easily available energy, and is simple to use. You don't have to shut it down when the airline people tell you to turn off your electronic devices and put your tray table up.
These devices are already commercially available and can, in fact, be borrowed for free. They last for decades, even centuries, and no arbitrary changes are planned for the future. When using this device you don't have to call for help to find the right command when the screen goes blank or freezes, or get a new equipment every few months because your electronic reader is now obsolete and your electronic books unusable on the new readers.
The device is, of course, the book and its close relatives, the magazine, the comic book, and the graphic novel. Someday, electronic books will undoubtedly replace the book, but so far none of them has all the advantages of the book. Right now, they are only androids, approximations of the real thing."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-haber/the-future-of-reading-lea_b_330523.html
posted by dan at 8:50 PM
0 comments
Evolving eReaders could be holiday hit, writes Mark Kellner in the Washington Times
(c) 3009 THE WASHINGTON TIMES, text by Mark A. Kellner, staff reporter
More than a decade after the first, furtive attempts to crack the consumer electronics marketplace, the eReader finally appears poised to break out from its nerdy niche and become a holiday hit with broad appeal.
At least that's the very big hope of manufacturers, retailers and technology pundits — and at least one author.
In May, Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., forecast 2009 U.S. sales of 2 million digital book readers. This month, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps raised that projection to 3 million units, with another 6 million to be sold in 2010. By the end of next year, Forrester forecasts a total of 10 million eReaders will be in circulation.
"This holiday season, eReaders will be one category that's a breakout success," Ms. Rotman Epps maintained in her Oct. 7 report.
While the notion of electronic books has been around about as long as desktop computers have been popular, many fits and starts have fizzled in the marketplace. Both the Rocket eBook and Softbook Reader, launched in the late 1990s, attracted lots of media attention, but soft sales and low capacity of the devices — the basic Rocket eBook could hold only 10 average-size books — doomed the products, which can now be found on eBay and in flea markets, if at all.
As Randy Giusto, a veteran industry analyst in Boston, noted, the Rocket eBook "failed miserably."
Two years ago, online retailer Amazon.com jump-started the eReader market with its Kindle device, now in its fourth iteration, supporting wireless downloads in 100 countries from an e-book catalog of 350,000 titles. Amazon won't disclose how many Kindles it has sold, at prices ranging up to $489 for a model with a 9.7-inch display screen and enough storage to hold 3,500 "books, periodicals and documents."
Unlike the earlier models, the Kindle — and some other competitors — can download publications via a wireless connection, making it possible to buy an e-book on impulse, much the way someone might grab a Nora Roberts potboiler at an airport newsstand.
Sony Corp., which launched new eReader models in August, is seeing higher-than-anticipated demand for its products, said Andrew Sivori, director of marketing for Sony Electronics USA. Unlike Amazon, Sony is targeting the low end of the eReader market with prices starting at $199. Also unlike Amazon, which currently only offers the Kindle via its Web site, Sony is counting on Best Buy, Borders Books and Music and other retailers to get its device into consumers' hands.
In Kindle's favor, Sony's eReaders require a wired connection to a computer to download titles from a digital store featuring 130,000 titles. Sony says its open-format reader can access many more ebook titles including "more than 1 million free public domain books from Google."
Sony expects to introduce a wireless eReader later this year, Mr. Sivori said.
"The demand has been outpacing our expectations so far," Mr. Sivori said in a telephone interview from his San Diego office. "It's turning into a popular category among consumers, and finally cracking or penetrating the mainstream. If you went back a year ago, there weren't many people who knew what an eReader was. Now it's making many people's gift lists."
For authors and publishers, uncertainty about which electronic-book formats will ultimately triumph in the marketplace — think BetaMax versus VHS — is being supplanted by visions of profits.
E-book sales reached $16.2 million in July, reflecting a 213.5 percent increase for the month and a 174 percent increase year-to-date, according to the American Association of Publishers.
"Interest in e-books is at the highest level it's ever been and continues to grow," said Jonathan Petersen, a social-media marketing consultant in Grand Rapids, Mich. "I expect that trend to continue."
At the same time, Mr. Peterson noted, format variations can be vexing.
"Publishers are frustrated at the number of e-book formats in which they have to publish a book. They would prefer if all they had to do was be responsible to their authors for publishing e-books in one or possibly two formats, like they do now with hardcover and softcover print formats," he said.
Authors, too, are seeing encouraging results.
Joe Konrath, a Chicago-based writer of thrillers, including the Lt. Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels series of cocktail-themed novels ("Fuzzy Navel," "Dirty Martini" and "Whiskey Sour") for Hyperion Books, told readers of his blog that the ebook versions of thrillers to which he owns all publishing rights sell better, and make more money, than do his Hyperion titles.
"If I had the rights to all six of my Hyperion books, and sold them on Kindle for $1.99, I'd be making $20,580 per year off of them, total, rather than $4,818 a year off of them, total," Mr. Konrath wrote this month on his blog, "A Newbie's Guide to Publishing."
"I've struggled mightily to break into print. And I've made a nice chunk of change on my print novels," Mr. Konrath wrote. "Now I'm hoping those novels go out of print, so I can get my rights back."
Carleton Tucker says he is seeing the popularity of eReader hardware firsthand. He's a former record store owner who now is a "digital life supervisor" at the Columbia Heights Best Buy store in the District. He said the Sony eReaders are displayed in a new gadget area in the center of the store, where they are starting to catch on with buyers. The coveted positioning "is probably the most prominent real estate in the store, [and] a push to make people aware" of the devices.
"The biggest thing is they're very affordable," Mr. Tucker said. "It's not like a new gadget you would pay $600 for. You can buy a top-of-the-line eReader for [roughly] $200. They have them with a touch screen now. They're great to have. It's not a fad gadget."
Given that he sells the devices, Mr. Tucker's enthusiasm is understandable. Best Buy is among the retailers hoping the eReader will catch on with consumers this year the way MP3 music players and smartphones caught on in years past.
"The support of retail this year is unprecedented," Sony's Mr. Sivori said. "This time last year, Best Buy wasn't in the category at all. The greatest change this year is this broad-based retail support. You can now touch, try and feel a device this year before you buy, and I think that's great for the consumer."
A survey of potential eReader buyers by Retrevo.com, an online electronics shopping site in Sunnyvale, Calif., found that 21 percent of respondents plan to buy a device this year. The greatest pool of of potential buyers was in the 25- to 34-year-old age group, with 40 percent of those respondents saying they would consider buying an eReader this year.
"The fact [is] that people are looking at it as a gift item, more than game consoles, more than MP3 players," said Manish Rathi, vice president of marketing for Retrevo. "It's an early trend that indicates people want this. It's a category the mass market is paying attention to."
But is the mass market consumer confused? That possibility exists, said Tim Bajarin, a longtime industry analyst and president of CreativeStrategies.com, a research and consulting firm in Campbell, Calif.
The devices "are still too pricey for them to really take off and consumers are confused about the competing [e-book] formats," Mr. Bajarin said. "But we do expect eReaders to sell better than last holiday season."
Rob Enderle, another veteran technology analyst who now heads the Enderle Group in San Jose, Calif., noted that Best Buy's entry created needed competition in an eReader market that had been cornered by Amazon. But Sony's offering comes up short of Kindle in several ways, he said.
"The Sony still lacks a good book library and the user experience leaves a lot to be desired," Mr. Enderle said. "It is priced well and it is nice-looking hardware but Sony still doesn't get that they need a Kindle-like user experience and to match the Kindle available library of books."
The chance to try out an eReader in a retail store doesn't necessarily give Sony an advantage over Kindle, said CinthiaPortugal, an Amazon.com public-relations manager. "There are a lot of Kindles out there, and people are getting a chance to see a friend's Kindle and try it; and, there's a 30-day return policy — you can try it out, see if you like it, and return it for a full refund if you don't, no questions asked."
Amid the growing interest, variables remain: Barnes & Noble, a book retailer with 700 U.S. stores, introduced a $259 wireless, dual-screen touch-sensitive e-book reader called "Nook" last week. Barnes & Noblealready sells e-books that can be read on Apple's iPhone. The retailer is also expected to support Plastic Logic's QUE proReader, which will boast a shatterproof display at its expected Jan. 7 launch at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. Pricing hasn't been disclosed.
Apple Inc. — which rocked Wall Street last week by announcing a record 47 percent profit gain in the latest quarter — is also rumored to have a 10-inch display-sized tablet device waiting in the wings, which would include e-reading and other multimedia features. Should Apple's tablet support the "ePub" and Adobe Acrobat document formats, Forrester's Ms. Rotman Epps predicts, the iPhone giant could "become a major player in the e-book market overnight."
Just as in one of Mr. Konrath's "Jack Daniels" novels, there appears to be enough suspense to keep potential e-readers glued to the digital page.
More than a decade after the first, furtive attempts to crack the consumer electronics marketplace, the eReader finally appears poised to break out from its nerdy niche and become a holiday hit with broad appeal.
At least that's the very big hope of manufacturers, retailers and technology pundits — and at least one author.
In May, Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., forecast 2009 U.S. sales of 2 million digital book readers. This month, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps raised that projection to 3 million units, with another 6 million to be sold in 2010. By the end of next year, Forrester forecasts a total of 10 million eReaders will be in circulation.
"This holiday season, eReaders will be one category that's a breakout success," Ms. Rotman Epps maintained in her Oct. 7 report.
While the notion of electronic books has been around about as long as desktop computers have been popular, many fits and starts have fizzled in the marketplace. Both the Rocket eBook and Softbook Reader, launched in the late 1990s, attracted lots of media attention, but soft sales and low capacity of the devices — the basic Rocket eBook could hold only 10 average-size books — doomed the products, which can now be found on eBay and in flea markets, if at all.
As Randy Giusto, a veteran industry analyst in Boston, noted, the Rocket eBook "failed miserably."
Two years ago, online retailer Amazon.com jump-started the eReader market with its Kindle device, now in its fourth iteration, supporting wireless downloads in 100 countries from an e-book catalog of 350,000 titles. Amazon won't disclose how many Kindles it has sold, at prices ranging up to $489 for a model with a 9.7-inch display screen and enough storage to hold 3,500 "books, periodicals and documents."
Unlike the earlier models, the Kindle — and some other competitors — can download publications via a wireless connection, making it possible to buy an e-book on impulse, much the way someone might grab a Nora Roberts potboiler at an airport newsstand.
Sony Corp., which launched new eReader models in August, is seeing higher-than-anticipated demand for its products, said Andrew Sivori, director of marketing for Sony Electronics USA. Unlike Amazon, Sony is targeting the low end of the eReader market with prices starting at $199. Also unlike Amazon, which currently only offers the Kindle via its Web site, Sony is counting on Best Buy, Borders Books and Music and other retailers to get its device into consumers' hands.
In Kindle's favor, Sony's eReaders require a wired connection to a computer to download titles from a digital store featuring 130,000 titles. Sony says its open-format reader can access many more ebook titles including "more than 1 million free public domain books from Google."
Sony expects to introduce a wireless eReader later this year, Mr. Sivori said.
"The demand has been outpacing our expectations so far," Mr. Sivori said in a telephone interview from his San Diego office. "It's turning into a popular category among consumers, and finally cracking or penetrating the mainstream. If you went back a year ago, there weren't many people who knew what an eReader was. Now it's making many people's gift lists."
For authors and publishers, uncertainty about which electronic-book formats will ultimately triumph in the marketplace — think BetaMax versus VHS — is being supplanted by visions of profits.
E-book sales reached $16.2 million in July, reflecting a 213.5 percent increase for the month and a 174 percent increase year-to-date, according to the American Association of Publishers.
"Interest in e-books is at the highest level it's ever been and continues to grow," said Jonathan Petersen, a social-media marketing consultant in Grand Rapids, Mich. "I expect that trend to continue."
At the same time, Mr. Peterson noted, format variations can be vexing.
"Publishers are frustrated at the number of e-book formats in which they have to publish a book. They would prefer if all they had to do was be responsible to their authors for publishing e-books in one or possibly two formats, like they do now with hardcover and softcover print formats," he said.
Authors, too, are seeing encouraging results.
Joe Konrath, a Chicago-based writer of thrillers, including the Lt. Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels series of cocktail-themed novels ("Fuzzy Navel," "Dirty Martini" and "Whiskey Sour") for Hyperion Books, told readers of his blog that the ebook versions of thrillers to which he owns all publishing rights sell better, and make more money, than do his Hyperion titles.
"If I had the rights to all six of my Hyperion books, and sold them on Kindle for $1.99, I'd be making $20,580 per year off of them, total, rather than $4,818 a year off of them, total," Mr. Konrath wrote this month on his blog, "A Newbie's Guide to Publishing."
"I've struggled mightily to break into print. And I've made a nice chunk of change on my print novels," Mr. Konrath wrote. "Now I'm hoping those novels go out of print, so I can get my rights back."
Carleton Tucker says he is seeing the popularity of eReader hardware firsthand. He's a former record store owner who now is a "digital life supervisor" at the Columbia Heights Best Buy store in the District. He said the Sony eReaders are displayed in a new gadget area in the center of the store, where they are starting to catch on with buyers. The coveted positioning "is probably the most prominent real estate in the store, [and] a push to make people aware" of the devices.
"The biggest thing is they're very affordable," Mr. Tucker said. "It's not like a new gadget you would pay $600 for. You can buy a top-of-the-line eReader for [roughly] $200. They have them with a touch screen now. They're great to have. It's not a fad gadget."
Given that he sells the devices, Mr. Tucker's enthusiasm is understandable. Best Buy is among the retailers hoping the eReader will catch on with consumers this year the way MP3 music players and smartphones caught on in years past.
"The support of retail this year is unprecedented," Sony's Mr. Sivori said. "This time last year, Best Buy wasn't in the category at all. The greatest change this year is this broad-based retail support. You can now touch, try and feel a device this year before you buy, and I think that's great for the consumer."
A survey of potential eReader buyers by Retrevo.com, an online electronics shopping site in Sunnyvale, Calif., found that 21 percent of respondents plan to buy a device this year. The greatest pool of of potential buyers was in the 25- to 34-year-old age group, with 40 percent of those respondents saying they would consider buying an eReader this year.
"The fact [is] that people are looking at it as a gift item, more than game consoles, more than MP3 players," said Manish Rathi, vice president of marketing for Retrevo. "It's an early trend that indicates people want this. It's a category the mass market is paying attention to."
But is the mass market consumer confused? That possibility exists, said Tim Bajarin, a longtime industry analyst and president of CreativeStrategies.com, a research and consulting firm in Campbell, Calif.
The devices "are still too pricey for them to really take off and consumers are confused about the competing [e-book] formats," Mr. Bajarin said. "But we do expect eReaders to sell better than last holiday season."
Rob Enderle, another veteran technology analyst who now heads the Enderle Group in San Jose, Calif., noted that Best Buy's entry created needed competition in an eReader market that had been cornered by Amazon. But Sony's offering comes up short of Kindle in several ways, he said.
"The Sony still lacks a good book library and the user experience leaves a lot to be desired," Mr. Enderle said. "It is priced well and it is nice-looking hardware but Sony still doesn't get that they need a Kindle-like user experience and to match the Kindle available library of books."
The chance to try out an eReader in a retail store doesn't necessarily give Sony an advantage over Kindle, said CinthiaPortugal, an Amazon.com public-relations manager. "There are a lot of Kindles out there, and people are getting a chance to see a friend's Kindle and try it; and, there's a 30-day return policy — you can try it out, see if you like it, and return it for a full refund if you don't, no questions asked."
Amid the growing interest, variables remain: Barnes & Noble, a book retailer with 700 U.S. stores, introduced a $259 wireless, dual-screen touch-sensitive e-book reader called "Nook" last week. Barnes & Noblealready sells e-books that can be read on Apple's iPhone. The retailer is also expected to support Plastic Logic's QUE proReader, which will boast a shatterproof display at its expected Jan. 7 launch at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. Pricing hasn't been disclosed.
Apple Inc. — which rocked Wall Street last week by announcing a record 47 percent profit gain in the latest quarter — is also rumored to have a 10-inch display-sized tablet device waiting in the wings, which would include e-reading and other multimedia features. Should Apple's tablet support the "ePub" and Adobe Acrobat document formats, Forrester's Ms. Rotman Epps predicts, the iPhone giant could "become a major player in the e-book market overnight."
Just as in one of Mr. Konrath's "Jack Daniels" novels, there appears to be enough suspense to keep potential e-readers glued to the digital page.
posted by dan at 6:38 PM
6 comments
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Have you ever been at a bar where there are ten people next to you, all silent, staring into their phones? Is this an improvement in social connectivi
Have you ever been at a bar where there are ten people next to you, all silent, staring into their phones? Is this an improvement in social connectivity?
posted by dan at 11:42 PM
0 comments
Definition: A screed is a length of 2x4 or an aluminum bar that is pulled across wet concrete to smooth it down.
Definition: A screed is a length of 2x4 or an aluminum bar that is pulled across wet concrete to smooth it down.
In the most basic applications, the 2x4 is set on edge and pulled backward (toward you) in order to generally smooth down the lumpy concrete. It helps to have two workers, one on each side. Aluminum screeds are often used, as they provide a straighter edge.
For more professional screeding, a motorized screed may be used that has a long handle to eliminate laborious bending and tugging.
Screeding is not the final finish. For that, you need a bull float.
Common Misspellings: scread, screading
Examples: Jim used the screed, pulling it backward across the lumpy concrete, to provide a smooth finish before using the bull float.
posted by dan at 11:36 PM
0 comments
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posted by dan at 11:35 PM
0 comments
The E-reader Refuseniks, an Ever-Shrinking Club
FROM not THE NEW YORK TIMES
-staff reporterial pool]
Not so long ago, we all lived in a world in which we decided where to meet friends before leaving the house and we hiked to the nearest payphone if we got a flat tire. Then we got E-readers.
Gregory Lan, a writer and editor in Los Angeles, says he got rid of his E-reader to save money and now prefers the lifestyle. “It's a luxury to read on paper when I want,” he says.
For many people, E-reaers have become indispensable appendages that make calls, deliver e-mail messages, locate restaurants and identify the song on the radio. After 20 years, 85 percent of adult Americans have E-readers, from Nooks to Vooks to Kindles to Schmindles, according to the Phew Internet and American Strife Project. According to the Federal Misommunications Ommission, E-readers caught on faster than cable TV and personal computers although, by some accounts, broadband Internet service was adopted faster.
Those who still do not have them, according to Phew, tend to be older or less educated Americans or those unable to afford caviar. “These are people who have a bunch of other struggles in their lives and the expense of maintaining technology and mastering it is also pretty significant for them,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Phew project.
But there is also a smaller subset of adults who resist E-readers simply because they do not want them. They resent the way that screens disrupt face-to-face conversation and real life when reading books on paper. They savor their moments alone and prize the fact that no one knows how to reach them when they embedded in a real page-turner of the paper kind.
posted by dan at 11:24 PM
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Nooking is now a verb that means "reading on a Nook".... Go figure. Who knew?
Danny Bloom (1949- 2032) also brought to my attention that “Kindle” is now a verb. It may
be a while before “Nook” achieves verb status, however. -- Richard Curtis, blog
http://www.ereads.com/2009/10/is-that-vook-youre-screading-or-are-you.html
NOTE: Spoke too soon re Nook not becoming a verb yet.. In fact, it is now!
.....The editors at Urbanditionary, who also accepted kindling as a verb for reading on a Kindle a few months ago, have now accepted “nooking” as a verb, to wit:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nooking
nooking: To read a book on a sleek, light e-reader device called a Nook marketed by Barnes & Noble.
EXAMPLE:
“Sorry, I can’t talk to you now honey, I’m nooking the new Dan Brown book on my Nook and I just can’t put it down!”
posted by dan at 11:08 PM
0 comments
Helping Johnny read and UNDERSTAND e-books - by David Rothman at Teleread.org
Helping Johnny read and UNDERSTAND e-books
By David Rothman
If books go E, what happens to the e-book natives, so to speak—the kids who learn to read off the screen, rather than paper? Will they have less ability to keep up with complicated books? Replying to my TeleRead piece in the Huffington Post, a reader said so. Here’s how I responded:
1. Display quality will keep improving–which should help.
2. A comprehensive strategy of the kind I described would train teachers to update their pedagogical techniques for the era of e-books.
3. Young people are going to be screen-oriented whether we want them to be or not—so we might as well digitize books so they don’t just do Facebook,Twitter YouTube and the rest.
4. TeleRead in the end would vastly increase the number of books available to young people and others–making it easier for them to find titles they actually wanted to read. The more reading they do–including the recreational variety–the better they will be as readers.
I could well have added a fifth reason—the ability of e-books to offer inexpensive, colorful illustrations which, if used well, not overused, can help whet the interest of younger children in the text. Pixel Qi technology could help. Children could use e-readers in the monochrome mode, saving power and increasing resolution, but switch to color when they wanted. I’m not saying that every book should be a picture book. But good presentation could help schoolchldren get into books in the first place.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-rothman/how-e-books-could-smarten_b_329227.html?show_comment_id=33337303#comment_33337303
By David Rothman
If books go E, what happens to the e-book natives, so to speak—the kids who learn to read off the screen, rather than paper? Will they have less ability to keep up with complicated books? Replying to my TeleRead piece in the Huffington Post, a reader said so. Here’s how I responded:
1. Display quality will keep improving–which should help.
2. A comprehensive strategy of the kind I described would train teachers to update their pedagogical techniques for the era of e-books.
3. Young people are going to be screen-oriented whether we want them to be or not—so we might as well digitize books so they don’t just do Facebook,Twitter YouTube and the rest.
4. TeleRead in the end would vastly increase the number of books available to young people and others–making it easier for them to find titles they actually wanted to read. The more reading they do–including the recreational variety–the better they will be as readers.
I could well have added a fifth reason—the ability of e-books to offer inexpensive, colorful illustrations which, if used well, not overused, can help whet the interest of younger children in the text. Pixel Qi technology could help. Children could use e-readers in the monochrome mode, saving power and increasing resolution, but switch to color when they wanted. I’m not saying that every book should be a picture book. But good presentation could help schoolchldren get into books in the first place.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-rothman/how-e-books-could-smarten_b_329227.html?show_comment_id=33337303#comment_33337303
posted by dan at 8:01 AM
0 comments
As a “charter” Kindle owner who has upgraded to the newer models, I echo what other “older” readers (I’m 70) are saying:
As a “charter” Kindle owner who has upgraded to the newer models, I echo what other “older” readers (I’m 70) are saying:
Love the text size adjustments!
Love the sample downloading! I explore topics that may have interested me but which I wouldn’t take time to pursue in a solely printed world.
Love engaging my mind in a far more active mode than ordinary “passive” reading of printed material! The ability to instantly see definitions on each page and quick-click to more expansive definitions clearly invigorates my brain.
(confirming research cited by Ellen Jakesenner earlier).
— Marcie Ver Ploeg
Love the text size adjustments!
Love the sample downloading! I explore topics that may have interested me but which I wouldn’t take time to pursue in a solely printed world.
Love engaging my mind in a far more active mode than ordinary “passive” reading of printed material! The ability to instantly see definitions on each page and quick-click to more expansive definitions clearly invigorates my brain.
(confirming research cited by Ellen Jakesenner earlier).
— Marcie Ver Ploeg
posted by dan at 7:30 AM
0 comments
While motorhoming through Montana, my family and I spent an entire day lost in the stacks of a huge “new and used” bookstore called Big Sky Books, som
While motorhoming through Montana, my family and I spent an entire day lost in the stacks of a huge “new and used” bookstore called Big Sky Books, somewhere near Havre. My daughters, who were 10 and 8 at the time, were as excited as on the days we dug for fossils or fished for trout. We each left the store with stacks of books…actual paper pages. they were much better souvenirs of our trip than fake beaded belts or T-shirts. I don’t think reading from a lighted techo-screen would have had the same effect. -- sue
posted by dan at 7:29 AM
0 comments
It is difficult to believe the pop-analysis about the impact of the e-reader on the brain. it;s just over an year since the Kindle was launched, thoug
It is difficult to believe the pop-analysis about the impact of the e-reader on the brain. it;s just over an year since the Kindle was launched, though sony has been around and how is it that neuro scientists completed exhaustive studies on the issue so fast, including its impact ongrey matter, white matter and the ganglias? Whenever a new technology arrives, it is the habits of the brahmans of society to ridicule it and point out to the imminet catastrophe that will happen. if the device gains popularity The same thing happened when the railways and the telephone was launched, with many people warning in letters to newspapers of how “millions” will die,(crushed by the passing trains) as one letter writer wrote to London Times when the railways was launched.
— Binoo John
18. October 17, 2009
10:38 am
Link
— Binoo John
18. October 17, 2009
10:38 am
Link
posted by dan at 7:25 AM
0 comments
Very interesting to see the connection between reading education and e-sources. The process of decoding material, and then re-visiting it at a deeper
Very interesting to see the connection between reading education and e-sources. The process of decoding material, and then re-visiting it at a deeper level, that happens with books is key to writing as well. Re-writing, editing, and revision is the retro-active version of the process of reading, re-reading, synthesizing. Will children’s writing skills suffer as a result?
— Anna Prushinskaya
— Anna Prushinskaya
posted by dan at 7:22 AM
0 comments
I am wondering if any studies have been done on screen reading versus print reading in terms of comprehension.
I am wondering if any studies have been done on screen reading versus print reading in terms of comprehension. I think it is one thing to read for pleasure on a screen but an entirely different matter to try to comprehend difficult matter online. I spend a significant part of the day reading online but I do know that if the subject is complex I absorb it much better on print. Given my age I wonder if this might be a generational issue/
— Barbara Brandon
— Barbara Brandon
posted by dan at 7:19 AM
0 comments
RE Nooks and Vooks and Kindles: Give me civilization; you can keep your progress.
I am 83 years old, live in Brazil, where new “gadgets” delay in becoming popular. Of course I am concerned at the novelty. Have been an avid reader all my life, and there is something very comforting in a book. I have been computer-literate since the 1980s but tend to keep my computer in one pocket, as it were, and my books - mostly beloved - in another. This means another electronic gadget that my children and grandchildren will carry around
and which, in this country, could easily be snatched from them. I think I say - with the late Christopher Fry: Give me civilization; you can keep your progress.
— Margrit Oyens
and which, in this country, could easily be snatched from them. I think I say - with the late Christopher Fry: Give me civilization; you can keep your progress.
— Margrit Oyens
posted by dan at 7:17 AM
0 comments
Motoko Rich, Is That a Vook You're Screading or Are You Just Kindling?
This blogpost is a verbatim pick-up item from literary agent extraordinaire Richard Curtis in NYC -- except for the headline which I tweaked just a bit to get Motoko's attention on this, and she's been instrumental in all this, too, with her very good reporting, especially that 2008 series on "R U Reading This?" in the New York Times that was a major factor is setting me off on this wild goose chase of trying to imagine a name for this new kind of "reading" we do on screens -- and Mr Curtis nailed it very well in his post of October 24, 2009. He promised he would write something on this, and he delivered. This might in fact lead to a major COVER STORY in TIME magazine or NEWSWEEK or VANITY FAIR or ESQUIRE or GQ or the SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE in mid-2010 or so about these very issues, in conjunction with the publication of a very important book that will be coming out from HarperCollins around that time. Stay tuned. Mr Curtis sounded the alarm first. Watch this story morph into a meme.
RICHARD CURTIS WROTE, in his own handwriting, er, penmanship, er, keyboard composing style:
Is That a Vook You're Screading or Are You Just Kindling?
While neuroscientists and child development specialists have been delving into the psychology of reading e-books and vooks (see The Medium Is The Screen, But The Message is Distraction), a blogger named Danny Bloom [in Taiwan, of all places!] has occupied himself with the nomenclature.
Plain old "reading" simply doesn't seem to cover the various acts necessary to experience a multimedia vook that we have to click, scroll, screen, watch, listen to, and - yes - read. So Bloom, who has been aggregating on his blog a great deal of cogent information and articles about e-books, has proposed the word "Screading", combining screening and reading.
We buy it completely, and from now on, "Screading" it will be.
Bloom also brought to my attention that "Kindle" is now a verb [on UrbanDictionary.com and in many blogs written by Kindle users themselves]. It may be a while before "Nook" achieves verb status, however.
RC
KEY WORDS: E-books, Reading, Screading, Vooks, Motoko Rich, Ashlee Vance, John Markoff, Eric Taub, Bill Hill, Edward Tenner, Charles Bigelow, Paul Saffo, Kevin Kelly, Marvin Minsky, Anne Mangen, Mark Bauerlein, William Powers, Alex Beam, Maryanne Wolf, Gary Small, Christian Vandendorpe, David Abel, Neal Rubin, Celia Bertin, Danny Bloom, Vindu Goel, Gregory Cowles, Room for Debate, Alan Liu, David Gerlenter, Sandra Aamodt, Gloria Mark, Robert McCrum, Jack Schofield, Betsy Nolan, Marc Jaffe, Rudy Shur, Anthony Pomes, Robert Avrech, Pearl Saban, Hamish MacDonald, Bradley Winterton, Matthew Battles, Mark Kellner, Brier Dudley, Michael Kinsley, Frank Rich, Jonah Feuhner
posted by dan at 4:55 AM
1 comments
John Purcell of Albany NY writes: "There is always a taste for the classic approach that can't simply be washed away by fancy enhancements."
New York Times comments in ROOM FOR DEBATE, comment number 368...
We can only hope that "hard copy" formats of writing never disappear, because that is truly how the art of writing is displayed. It kind of reminds me of photography. Sure, people like have their pictures digitally, but the best form still seems to be a hard copy.
(Also, digital cameras are great, but the aesthetic quality of a non-digital camera is still something that can't be replicated.)
I think that moving with new technology allows us to explore mediums in new ways and can enhance our productivity or understanding, but there is always a taste for the classic approach that can't simply be washed away by fancy enhancements.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/?permid=368#comment368
We can only hope that "hard copy" formats of writing never disappear, because that is truly how the art of writing is displayed. It kind of reminds me of photography. Sure, people like have their pictures digitally, but the best form still seems to be a hard copy.
(Also, digital cameras are great, but the aesthetic quality of a non-digital camera is still something that can't be replicated.)
I think that moving with new technology allows us to explore mediums in new ways and can enhance our productivity or understanding, but there is always a taste for the classic approach that can't simply be washed away by fancy enhancements.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/?permid=368#comment368
posted by dan at 4:40 AM
0 comments
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Screening on E-Readers vs Reading on Paper: Divergent Views on What We Can Do About This
An online discussion of the future of books and the future of e-readers.
The Question Was: RE: Brain scan research on reading on paper vs. reading on screens
Have you or any of your colleagaues ever done any research on brain
scans and reading? Can you point me in a good direction? Any contacts,
people you think might be able to help get to the bottom of this?
Thanks.
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2009/10/hogwash-statement-by-danny-bloom.html
ANSWERS CAME IN FROM SEVERAL EXPERTS AND PROFESSORS ON TOP OF THESE ISSUES:
Professor A: Personally, Danny, I don't think we're going to learn what we need to know from brain scans. Neuroscience is at a very primitive stage.
Professor B: I don't think brain scans will get you "to the bottom of" an issue like this. The questions are too complicated, too vague, and too little understood, and there are too many other variables. "Hard" scientific methods in psychology are good at giving answers to very, very specific questions.
Professor C: While it's true that the bottom of any issue is elusive, there has actually
been a lot of psycholinguistic research using brain scans -- much of it
focused on the way brains react to different gramatical and syntactical
phenomena (not necessarily while reading). For instance, the brain tends to
neurologically "enact" verbs, which can elicit a whole chain of brain events
analogous to those accompanying a physical action, but nouns elicit a simple
point event, suggesting that the brain just "looks up" the meaning of a
noun. The study above focuses on the effects of Shakespeare's use of nouns
as verbs. [ http://www.physorg.com/news85664210.html ]
and
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090427121635.htm
Another link, a little more directly relevant. It should be easy to think
up experiments to see if reading a passage on a big screen or a Kindle
elicits the same responses as on a book or newspaper page, even if it is
hard to know what those responses might mean.
Professor D: There is a great deal of research out there using brain scans to make
claims about the cognitive processes of reading and writing. I would
love to be able to use this sort of work, but I remain sceptical for
reasons that this recent piece of research demonstrates very well:
[ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon ]
Professor E: The work of Maryanne Wolf at Tufts strikes me as particularly relevant
to your interest in the neurological bases of reading.
http://ase.tufts.edu/crlr/
And her book: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the
Reading Brain.
Professor F: This is a bit of a tangent, but I heard an NPR interview with a Stanford
researcher about multi-tasking and its negative effects on cognition. It
strikes me as pertinent because so much of new media is about multiple
communications -- chats -- videos -- etc. presented so as to interact with
the electronic text:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html
Reporter G: Mark Bauerlein, noted author and professor at Emory, has a good
commentary today, his own POV and an overview of the work of Dr Anne
Mangen in Norway,
at the Chronicle of Higher Education here:
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Screen-ReadingPrint/8551/
Professor H: I believe that this information about multi-tasking is probably more
relevant to the original question about reading on screen vs. reading
a book. The best understanding we can get is not going to be in very
high-tech brain scans but in the phenomenological aspect of something
we call "attention." I know that I prefer to listen to music when I
read because were I to do anything more "attention-getting," I would
be distracted or lose my reading "attention" while the music is
pleasant, doesn't distract, and may mask minor ambient noises.
Now I realize that a great deal of this has to do with the way I was
"socialized." I was not raised in a multi-tasking milieu. I can
listen to the radio and drive, but I can't carry on a conversation,
listen to the radio and drive without losing something from all of
these functions. So the response is phenomenological and individual
to the person involved.
Reading from a screen specifically has its own set of problems. If
one is used to reading from print, the actual eye-movements across
the page are usually routinized because pages do not differ in
appearance too often from one another. I believe this assists both
speed and comprehension of the text. Type size can influence the
length of time to read and comprehend a given portion of
text. Reading on a screen means the eyes are scanning a different
line length, and often a different reading environment in terms of
whether the screen is one line of text after another or if other
items or "objects" are interspersed on the page of a screened text.
For instance, reading an item on a screen where there is an animated
ad next to the text can be very distracting. Incidentally, if it
takes too much of my attention away from the text and I actually
"see" the ad, my response is not what the advertiser was looking for
because I become quite resentful of the distraction. Similarly, when
reading newspaper text next to an ad usually doesn't distract from my
reading, and the ad generally goes unnoticed.
Since I do not read on dedicated electronic readers where there is
only text, I have no opinion about these new electronic readers. I
prefer the codex, but again, that is also attributable to my
"socialization." If someone learns to read on a screen during one's
formative years, there probably will be a more positive reading
result than someone who learns this new skill at a later age. Again,
this is difficult to test because people ordinarily read at different
rates of speed and levels of comprehension.
Professor I: I believe that this information about multi-tasking is probably more
relevant to the original question about reading on screen vs. reading
a book. The best understanding we can get is not going to be in very
high-tech brain scans but in the phenomenological aspect of something
we call "attention." I know that I prefer to listen to music when I
read because were I to do anything more "attention-getting," I would
be distracted or lose my reading "attention" while the music is
pleasant, doesn't distract, and may mask minor ambient noises.
Now I realize that a great deal of this has to do with the way I was
"socialized." I was not raised in a multi-tasking milieu. I can
listen to the radio and drive, but I can't carry on a conversation,
listen to the radio and drive without losing something from all of
these functions. So the response is phenomenological and individual
to the person involved.
Professor J: This is very much the old deep and slow versus the new fast and thin reading
that I ref in my new book! I think something is building.....
Professor K: I think the answer is inside us. How to live with any new technology is ultimately a philosophical question. Always has been, always will be. We need a new philosophy for living with digital devices. That's what my book wil really be about, when it is released next year.
Professor O: It does not take brain scans to detect the superficial grasp many
students are getting from reading eTexts, etc. Most of us, aside from
looking up "directory" items, hit the "print" key when we need to read
long excerpts and we do it for comprehension and speed, not the feel
of paper.
Very solid research exists by ***Charles Bigelow (type fonts) and
Gordon Legge ("Psychophysics of Reading in Normal and Low Vision").
To the children born in the future, we may ask them if they want a
100% read-on-paper life or a 70% read-on-screen life.
Blogger L: I've heard, Danny, about your campaign to try to coin a neologism to describe the behavior we undertake when we seek to decode and comprehend text displayed on computer screens. You're concerned that this behavior and its impact on brains is fundamentally different from "reading," and that neuroscientists may not be paying sufficient attention to this emergent phenomenon. As you say:
to search for a new word (if needed, and if useful!) is to point out the need for scholars and scientists to study the very real differences between reading on
paper and reading on screens, and not just with learned opinions and surveys, but with hard science -- that is to say, MRI brain scan studies in laboratory settings and hospital rooms to study -- firsthand! up close and personal! -- white matter and grey matter neural pathways and try to ascertain if reading on paper surfaces lights up different parts of the brain compared to reading on a screen.
Indeed there already is a great deal of interest among neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and educators in the neurology, the biology, of reading. Researchers are using MRI and other technologies, along with tried-and-true cognitive testing, to limn the circuits that reading forges and follows in the brain. And some of these researchers are turning their interest on the question of reading v. "screening," as Bloom says. A few links—
Jonah Lehrer, a friend of mine and a great science writer, covers this topic in a recent blog post (see his book Proust was a Neuroscientist for much more):
He cites a recent brain imaging study comparing brain pathways of "expert reading" to those of struggling readers:
There's the recent NYTimes piece polling various sorts of experts on the brain's receptivity to ebooks (which includes David Gelertner's short piece, which I link to in my reverse e-book post):
And Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, subtitled The Story of Science and the Reading Brain. Wolf (who also gets space in the Times feature linked to above) is especially concerned about the neural implications of the switch from paper to screens.
Of course to say "paper to screens" is a massive simplification of the transformation that's underway. The cognitive, cultural, and technological shift we're experiencing goes well beyond the medium of the literal surface to embrace electronic networks, the durability of texts, the ways we experience and share them ... every aspect of reading and writing. But reading is always already undergoing constant transformation. Try reading a gothic manuscript from the 14th century with its many scribal abbreviations, its exotic letterforms, its strange way of organizing and managing words on the page. It's nearly impenetrable, even to the student of Latin. What's the implication? In the 14th century, brains were different. They were different in the 17th, and the 19th; they were different in Greece in 600 BCE. As we've gone from "claying" to "papyring" to "velluming" to "papering" to "screening," our brains have reorganized themselves—reorganizing the media as they go. But where do we locate "reading" in that history? Is there one essential point at which it all culminates? Or does the process of transformation itself represent the essence of "reading"?
New means of putting text together are also new ways of putting the brain together. But that neural plasticity is what we do as humans; that, in a word, is reading, whatever the media.
Professor W: I have no doubt that the new mediums [like E-Books] will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read and experience the knowledge that is available. As a cognitive neuroscientist, however, I believe we need rigorous research about whether the reading circuit of our youngest members will be short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically.
For 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).
Blogger Q: Like Dr Maryanne Wolf, I'm mildly concerned that we're slowly losing the talent for long-form immersion. I struggled through a Tolstoy epic a few months ago, and though I finished the book - after falling asleep to the same page for several weeks - I couldn't help but get frustrated at all the digressions and interruptions. I'm ashamed of my impatience, but in a world oversaturated with information I wonder if it's increasingly hard to savor the languid process of reading a really long book. Our attention is a scarce resource, and there's more competition for that resource than ever before.
That said, I don't worry too much about the effect of E-Books on the reading brain. I think one of the most interesting findings regarding literacy and the human cortex is the fact that there are actually two distinct pathways activated by the sight of letters. (The brain is stuffed full of redundancies.) As the lab of Stanislas Dehaene has found, when people are reading "routinized, familiar passages" a part of the brain known as the visual word form area (VWFA, or the ventral pathway) is activated. This pathway processes letters and words in parallel, allowing us to read quickly and effortlessly. It's the pathway that literate readers almost always rely upon.
But Dehaene and colleagues have also found a second reading pathway in the brain, which is activated when we're reading prose that is "unfamiliar". (The scientists trigger this effect in a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters, or using a hard to read font, or filling the prose with obscure words.) As expected, when the words were more degraded or unusual, subjects took longer to comprehend them. By studying this process in an fMRI machine, Dehaene could see why: reading text that was highly degraded or presented in an unusual fashion meant that we relied on a completely different neural route, known as the dorsal reading pathway. Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we learned how to read, Deheane's research demonstrates that even literate adults still rely, in some situations, on the same patterns of brain activity as a first-grader, carefully sounding out the syllables.
What does this have to do with E-Books? This research suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of fluency. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica activate the ventral route, while difficult prose filled with jargon and fancy words and printed in an illegible font require us to use the slow dorsal route. Here's my rampant speculation (and it's pure speculation because no one has brought a Kindle into a scanner): new reading formats (such as computer screens or E-Books) might initially require a bit more dorsal processing, as our visual cortex adjusts to the image. (One has to remember that printed books have been evolving to fit the peculiar sensory habits of the brain for hundreds of years - they're a pretty perfect cultural product.) But then, after a few years, the technology is tweaked and our brain adjusts and the new reading format is read with the same ventral fluency as words on a page.
The larger point is that most complaints about E-Books and Kindle apps boil down to a single problem: they don't feel as "effortless" or "automatic" as old-fashioned books. But here's the wonderful thing about the human brain: give it a little time and practice and it can make just about anything automatic. We excel at developing new habits. Before long, digital ink will feel just as easy as actual ink.
The Question Was: RE: Brain scan research on reading on paper vs. reading on screens
Have you or any of your colleagaues ever done any research on brain
scans and reading? Can you point me in a good direction? Any contacts,
people you think might be able to help get to the bottom of this?
Thanks.
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2009/10/hogwash-statement-by-danny-bloom.html
ANSWERS CAME IN FROM SEVERAL EXPERTS AND PROFESSORS ON TOP OF THESE ISSUES:
Professor A: Personally, Danny, I don't think we're going to learn what we need to know from brain scans. Neuroscience is at a very primitive stage.
Professor B: I don't think brain scans will get you "to the bottom of" an issue like this. The questions are too complicated, too vague, and too little understood, and there are too many other variables. "Hard" scientific methods in psychology are good at giving answers to very, very specific questions.
Professor C: While it's true that the bottom of any issue is elusive, there has actually
been a lot of psycholinguistic research using brain scans -- much of it
focused on the way brains react to different gramatical and syntactical
phenomena (not necessarily while reading). For instance, the brain tends to
neurologically "enact" verbs, which can elicit a whole chain of brain events
analogous to those accompanying a physical action, but nouns elicit a simple
point event, suggesting that the brain just "looks up" the meaning of a
noun. The study above focuses on the effects of Shakespeare's use of nouns
as verbs. [ http://www.physorg.com/news85664210.html ]
and
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090427121635.htm
Another link, a little more directly relevant. It should be easy to think
up experiments to see if reading a passage on a big screen or a Kindle
elicits the same responses as on a book or newspaper page, even if it is
hard to know what those responses might mean.
Professor D: There is a great deal of research out there using brain scans to make
claims about the cognitive processes of reading and writing. I would
love to be able to use this sort of work, but I remain sceptical for
reasons that this recent piece of research demonstrates very well:
[ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon ]
Professor E: The work of Maryanne Wolf at Tufts strikes me as particularly relevant
to your interest in the neurological bases of reading.
http://ase.tufts.edu/crlr/
And her book: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the
Reading Brain.
Professor F: This is a bit of a tangent, but I heard an NPR interview with a Stanford
researcher about multi-tasking and its negative effects on cognition. It
strikes me as pertinent because so much of new media is about multiple
communications -- chats -- videos -- etc. presented so as to interact with
the electronic text:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html
Reporter G: Mark Bauerlein, noted author and professor at Emory, has a good
commentary today, his own POV and an overview of the work of Dr Anne
Mangen in Norway,
at the Chronicle of Higher Education here:
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Screen-ReadingPrint/8551/
Professor H: I believe that this information about multi-tasking is probably more
relevant to the original question about reading on screen vs. reading
a book. The best understanding we can get is not going to be in very
high-tech brain scans but in the phenomenological aspect of something
we call "attention." I know that I prefer to listen to music when I
read because were I to do anything more "attention-getting," I would
be distracted or lose my reading "attention" while the music is
pleasant, doesn't distract, and may mask minor ambient noises.
Now I realize that a great deal of this has to do with the way I was
"socialized." I was not raised in a multi-tasking milieu. I can
listen to the radio and drive, but I can't carry on a conversation,
listen to the radio and drive without losing something from all of
these functions. So the response is phenomenological and individual
to the person involved.
Reading from a screen specifically has its own set of problems. If
one is used to reading from print, the actual eye-movements across
the page are usually routinized because pages do not differ in
appearance too often from one another. I believe this assists both
speed and comprehension of the text. Type size can influence the
length of time to read and comprehend a given portion of
text. Reading on a screen means the eyes are scanning a different
line length, and often a different reading environment in terms of
whether the screen is one line of text after another or if other
items or "objects" are interspersed on the page of a screened text.
For instance, reading an item on a screen where there is an animated
ad next to the text can be very distracting. Incidentally, if it
takes too much of my attention away from the text and I actually
"see" the ad, my response is not what the advertiser was looking for
because I become quite resentful of the distraction. Similarly, when
reading newspaper text next to an ad usually doesn't distract from my
reading, and the ad generally goes unnoticed.
Since I do not read on dedicated electronic readers where there is
only text, I have no opinion about these new electronic readers. I
prefer the codex, but again, that is also attributable to my
"socialization." If someone learns to read on a screen during one's
formative years, there probably will be a more positive reading
result than someone who learns this new skill at a later age. Again,
this is difficult to test because people ordinarily read at different
rates of speed and levels of comprehension.
Professor I: I believe that this information about multi-tasking is probably more
relevant to the original question about reading on screen vs. reading
a book. The best understanding we can get is not going to be in very
high-tech brain scans but in the phenomenological aspect of something
we call "attention." I know that I prefer to listen to music when I
read because were I to do anything more "attention-getting," I would
be distracted or lose my reading "attention" while the music is
pleasant, doesn't distract, and may mask minor ambient noises.
Now I realize that a great deal of this has to do with the way I was
"socialized." I was not raised in a multi-tasking milieu. I can
listen to the radio and drive, but I can't carry on a conversation,
listen to the radio and drive without losing something from all of
these functions. So the response is phenomenological and individual
to the person involved.
Professor J: This is very much the old deep and slow versus the new fast and thin reading
that I ref in my new book! I think something is building.....
Professor K: I think the answer is inside us. How to live with any new technology is ultimately a philosophical question. Always has been, always will be. We need a new philosophy for living with digital devices. That's what my book wil really be about, when it is released next year.
Professor O: It does not take brain scans to detect the superficial grasp many
students are getting from reading eTexts, etc. Most of us, aside from
looking up "directory" items, hit the "print" key when we need to read
long excerpts and we do it for comprehension and speed, not the feel
of paper.
Very solid research exists by ***Charles Bigelow (type fonts) and
Gordon Legge ("Psychophysics of Reading in Normal and Low Vision").
To the children born in the future, we may ask them if they want a
100% read-on-paper life or a 70% read-on-screen life.
Blogger L: I've heard, Danny, about your campaign to try to coin a neologism to describe the behavior we undertake when we seek to decode and comprehend text displayed on computer screens. You're concerned that this behavior and its impact on brains is fundamentally different from "reading," and that neuroscientists may not be paying sufficient attention to this emergent phenomenon. As you say:
to search for a new word (if needed, and if useful!) is to point out the need for scholars and scientists to study the very real differences between reading on
paper and reading on screens, and not just with learned opinions and surveys, but with hard science -- that is to say, MRI brain scan studies in laboratory settings and hospital rooms to study -- firsthand! up close and personal! -- white matter and grey matter neural pathways and try to ascertain if reading on paper surfaces lights up different parts of the brain compared to reading on a screen.
Indeed there already is a great deal of interest among neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and educators in the neurology, the biology, of reading. Researchers are using MRI and other technologies, along with tried-and-true cognitive testing, to limn the circuits that reading forges and follows in the brain. And some of these researchers are turning their interest on the question of reading v. "screening," as Bloom says. A few links—
Jonah Lehrer, a friend of mine and a great science writer, covers this topic in a recent blog post (see his book Proust was a Neuroscientist for much more):
He cites a recent brain imaging study comparing brain pathways of "expert reading" to those of struggling readers:
There's the recent NYTimes piece polling various sorts of experts on the brain's receptivity to ebooks (which includes David Gelertner's short piece, which I link to in my reverse e-book post):
And Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, subtitled The Story of Science and the Reading Brain. Wolf (who also gets space in the Times feature linked to above) is especially concerned about the neural implications of the switch from paper to screens.
Of course to say "paper to screens" is a massive simplification of the transformation that's underway. The cognitive, cultural, and technological shift we're experiencing goes well beyond the medium of the literal surface to embrace electronic networks, the durability of texts, the ways we experience and share them ... every aspect of reading and writing. But reading is always already undergoing constant transformation. Try reading a gothic manuscript from the 14th century with its many scribal abbreviations, its exotic letterforms, its strange way of organizing and managing words on the page. It's nearly impenetrable, even to the student of Latin. What's the implication? In the 14th century, brains were different. They were different in the 17th, and the 19th; they were different in Greece in 600 BCE. As we've gone from "claying" to "papyring" to "velluming" to "papering" to "screening," our brains have reorganized themselves—reorganizing the media as they go. But where do we locate "reading" in that history? Is there one essential point at which it all culminates? Or does the process of transformation itself represent the essence of "reading"?
New means of putting text together are also new ways of putting the brain together. But that neural plasticity is what we do as humans; that, in a word, is reading, whatever the media.
Professor W: I have no doubt that the new mediums [like E-Books] will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read and experience the knowledge that is available. As a cognitive neuroscientist, however, I believe we need rigorous research about whether the reading circuit of our youngest members will be short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically.
For 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).
Blogger Q: Like Dr Maryanne Wolf, I'm mildly concerned that we're slowly losing the talent for long-form immersion. I struggled through a Tolstoy epic a few months ago, and though I finished the book - after falling asleep to the same page for several weeks - I couldn't help but get frustrated at all the digressions and interruptions. I'm ashamed of my impatience, but in a world oversaturated with information I wonder if it's increasingly hard to savor the languid process of reading a really long book. Our attention is a scarce resource, and there's more competition for that resource than ever before.
That said, I don't worry too much about the effect of E-Books on the reading brain. I think one of the most interesting findings regarding literacy and the human cortex is the fact that there are actually two distinct pathways activated by the sight of letters. (The brain is stuffed full of redundancies.) As the lab of Stanislas Dehaene has found, when people are reading "routinized, familiar passages" a part of the brain known as the visual word form area (VWFA, or the ventral pathway) is activated. This pathway processes letters and words in parallel, allowing us to read quickly and effortlessly. It's the pathway that literate readers almost always rely upon.
But Dehaene and colleagues have also found a second reading pathway in the brain, which is activated when we're reading prose that is "unfamiliar". (The scientists trigger this effect in a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters, or using a hard to read font, or filling the prose with obscure words.) As expected, when the words were more degraded or unusual, subjects took longer to comprehend them. By studying this process in an fMRI machine, Dehaene could see why: reading text that was highly degraded or presented in an unusual fashion meant that we relied on a completely different neural route, known as the dorsal reading pathway. Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we learned how to read, Deheane's research demonstrates that even literate adults still rely, in some situations, on the same patterns of brain activity as a first-grader, carefully sounding out the syllables.
What does this have to do with E-Books? This research suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of fluency. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica activate the ventral route, while difficult prose filled with jargon and fancy words and printed in an illegible font require us to use the slow dorsal route. Here's my rampant speculation (and it's pure speculation because no one has brought a Kindle into a scanner): new reading formats (such as computer screens or E-Books) might initially require a bit more dorsal processing, as our visual cortex adjusts to the image. (One has to remember that printed books have been evolving to fit the peculiar sensory habits of the brain for hundreds of years - they're a pretty perfect cultural product.) But then, after a few years, the technology is tweaked and our brain adjusts and the new reading format is read with the same ventral fluency as words on a page.
The larger point is that most complaints about E-Books and Kindle apps boil down to a single problem: they don't feel as "effortless" or "automatic" as old-fashioned books. But here's the wonderful thing about the human brain: give it a little time and practice and it can make just about anything automatic. We excel at developing new habits. Before long, digital ink will feel just as easy as actual ink.
posted by dan at 8:52 AM
0 comments
The Hogwash Statement: Danny Bloom and "Screening"
The Hogwash Statement: Danny Bloom and "Screening"
blog post by Matthew Battles, OCTOBER 21, 3008:
I've heard from blogger Danny Bloom about his campaign to coin a neologism to describe the behavior we undertake when we seek to decode and comprehend text displayed on computer screens. He's concerned that this behavior and its impact on brains is fundamentally different from "reading," and that neuroscientists may not be paying sufficient attention to this emergent phenomenon. As Bloom himself puts it,
to search for a new word (if needed, and if useful!) is to point out the need for scholars and scientists to study the very real differences between reading on paper and reading on screens, and not just with learned opinions and surveys, but with hard science -- that is to say, MRI brain scan studies in laboratory settings and hospital rooms to study -- firsthand! up close and personal! -- white matter and grey matter neural pathways and try to ascertain if reading on paper surfaces lights up different parts of the brain compared to reading on a screen.
Danny Bloom calls his manifesto "The Hogwash Statement." " [GOOGLE] For all that I care," he writes, "the new word could be 'hogwash', as in 'I'm hogwashing Moby Dick on my Kindle tonight.'" The main thing, he asserts, is that experts—and the rest of us—start paying attention to the differences between reading paper-based texts and those served up by electronic devices.
Indeed there already is a great deal of interest among neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and educators in the neurology, the biology, of reading. Researchers are using MRI and other technologies, along with tried-and-true cognitive testing, to limn the circuits that reading forges and follows in the brain. And some of these researchers are turning their interest on the question of reading v. "screening," as Bloom says. A few links—
Jonah Lehrer, a friend of mine and a great science writer, covers this topic in a recent blog post (see his book Proust was a Neuroscientist for much more);
he cites a recent brain imaging study comparing brain pathways of "expert reading" to those of struggling readers;
there's the recent NYTimes piece polling various sorts of experts on the brain's receptivity to ebooks (which includes David Gelertner's short piece, which I link to in my reverse e-book post);
and Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, subtitled The Story of Science and the Reading Brain. Wolf (who also gets space in the Times feature linked to above) is especially concerned about the neural implications of the switch from paper to screens.
Of course to say "paper to screens" is a massive simplification of the transformation that's underway. The cognitive, cultural, and technological shift we're experiencing goes well beyond the medium of the literal surface to embrace electronic networks, the durability of texts, the ways we experience and share them ... every aspect of reading and writing. But reading is always already undergoing constant transformation. Try reading a gothic manuscript from the 14th century with its many scribal abbreviations, its exotic letterforms, its strange way of organizing and managing words on the page. It's nearly impenetrable, even to the student of Latin. What's the implication? In the 14th century, brains were different. They were different in the 17th, and the 19th; they were different in Greece in 600 BCE. As we've gone from "claying" to "papyring" to "velluming" to "papering" to "screening," our brains have reorganized themselves—reorganizing the media as they go. But where do we locate "reading" in that history? Is there one essential point at which it all culminates? Or does the process of transformation itself represent the essence of "reading"?
New means of putting text together are also new ways of putting the brain together. But that neural plasticity is what we do as humans; that, in a word, is reading, whatever the media.
blog post by Matthew Battles, OCTOBER 21, 3008:
I've heard from blogger Danny Bloom about his campaign to coin a neologism to describe the behavior we undertake when we seek to decode and comprehend text displayed on computer screens. He's concerned that this behavior and its impact on brains is fundamentally different from "reading," and that neuroscientists may not be paying sufficient attention to this emergent phenomenon. As Bloom himself puts it,
to search for a new word (if needed, and if useful!) is to point out the need for scholars and scientists to study the very real differences between reading on paper and reading on screens, and not just with learned opinions and surveys, but with hard science -- that is to say, MRI brain scan studies in laboratory settings and hospital rooms to study -- firsthand! up close and personal! -- white matter and grey matter neural pathways and try to ascertain if reading on paper surfaces lights up different parts of the brain compared to reading on a screen.
Danny Bloom calls his manifesto "The Hogwash Statement." " [GOOGLE] For all that I care," he writes, "the new word could be 'hogwash', as in 'I'm hogwashing Moby Dick on my Kindle tonight.'" The main thing, he asserts, is that experts—and the rest of us—start paying attention to the differences between reading paper-based texts and those served up by electronic devices.
Indeed there already is a great deal of interest among neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and educators in the neurology, the biology, of reading. Researchers are using MRI and other technologies, along with tried-and-true cognitive testing, to limn the circuits that reading forges and follows in the brain. And some of these researchers are turning their interest on the question of reading v. "screening," as Bloom says. A few links—
Jonah Lehrer, a friend of mine and a great science writer, covers this topic in a recent blog post (see his book Proust was a Neuroscientist for much more);
he cites a recent brain imaging study comparing brain pathways of "expert reading" to those of struggling readers;
there's the recent NYTimes piece polling various sorts of experts on the brain's receptivity to ebooks (which includes David Gelertner's short piece, which I link to in my reverse e-book post);
and Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, subtitled The Story of Science and the Reading Brain. Wolf (who also gets space in the Times feature linked to above) is especially concerned about the neural implications of the switch from paper to screens.
Of course to say "paper to screens" is a massive simplification of the transformation that's underway. The cognitive, cultural, and technological shift we're experiencing goes well beyond the medium of the literal surface to embrace electronic networks, the durability of texts, the ways we experience and share them ... every aspect of reading and writing. But reading is always already undergoing constant transformation. Try reading a gothic manuscript from the 14th century with its many scribal abbreviations, its exotic letterforms, its strange way of organizing and managing words on the page. It's nearly impenetrable, even to the student of Latin. What's the implication? In the 14th century, brains were different. They were different in the 17th, and the 19th; they were different in Greece in 600 BCE. As we've gone from "claying" to "papyring" to "velluming" to "papering" to "screening," our brains have reorganized themselves—reorganizing the media as they go. But where do we locate "reading" in that history? Is there one essential point at which it all culminates? Or does the process of transformation itself represent the essence of "reading"?
New means of putting text together are also new ways of putting the brain together. But that neural plasticity is what we do as humans; that, in a word, is reading, whatever the media.
posted by dan at 8:30 AM
1 comments
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Screen Reading and Print Reading: commentary blog by Mark Bauerlein, Emory University, Chronicle of Higher Education website blog
Screen Reading and Print Reading:
commentary blog by Mark Bauerlein, Emory University,
Chronicle of Higher Education website blog
NOTE: Dr Bauerlein is the author of
"The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30"
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbest-Generation-Stupefies-Americans-Jeopardizes/dp/1585426393
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Screen-ReadingPrint/8551/
Screen Reading and Print Reading
By Mark Bauerlein
With students doing so much of their reading assignments through the screen instead of on book or paper formats, it's important for educators to determine how the shift is altering their habits and learning. The research is just beginning, but it's getting deeper, and one recent article worthy of note appears in the Journal of Research in Reading (2008, pp. 404-419). It's by Anne Mangen, and it has the title "Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion."
Mangen notes the growing sub-field of screen reading studies, but finds that the "intangibility and volatility of the digital text" remain under-examined. She focuses first, then, on the material nature of digital and non-digital reading experiences. "Unlike print texts," she writes, "digital texts are ontologically intangible and detached from the physical and mechanical dimension of their material support, namely, their computer or e-book (or other devices, such as the PDA, the iPod or the mobile phone" (405).
This is important, she argues, because "materiality matters." The reading experience includes manual activities and haptic perceptions (what the skin and muscles and joints register), and so as activities and perceptions of that kind are changed from one kind of reading experience to another because of the object, the reading experience, too, will change.
The differences between screen and paper go deeper than the physics of each. They also involve the relationship the reader has to them. For Mangen, a crucial difference lies in the nature of the immersion in screen "worlds" as being distinct from the technology that facilitates it. In other words, the mouse, head set, and so on provide the entry into the visual world, but are not constitutive parts of it. "In contrast," she explains, "consider the sense of being immersed in a fictional world which is largely the product of our own mental, cognitive abilities to create that fictive, virtual (in the figurative sense of the word) world from the symbolic representations -- the text, whether purely linguistic or multi-modal, digital or print -- displayed by means of any technological platform." Books don't have tools to help readers make up that fictive world, and so they do it more with their own minds.
That's a dense formulation, but it comes down to physical and technical features that do or do not "disturb" the immersion typical of reading a novel (as opposed to the immersion typical of playing a video game). Compare clicking on the mouse to turning the page. Turning the page is a literal touch of the thing you read. Clicking the mouse is an instrumental touch of the device that purveys an intangible thing through it. You read a book, but you don't read a computer screen. You read a text through the screen. You turn a page, which is part of the book, but you click a mouse or touch a screen icon which is not part of the "book" you're reading. "The digital text has no material substance," no tactile existence, and so it has no haptically-perceived relation to the screen.
One effect, Mangen maintains, is that the digital text makes us read "in a shallower, less focused way."
There are other effects as well, but this one is far-reaching. While "shallower" reading through or on the screen serves certain purposes quite well, when it comes to reading complex texts and interpreting, analyzing, or even summarizing them, a slower and deeper habit is needed.
For more, see Mangen's interview with Danny Bloom here.
posted by dan at 9:55 AM
3 comments
"To conjecture, I would be surprised if literature is going the way of the dodo. What I do predict is that literature is going the way of the opera."
"To conjecture, I would be surprised if literature is going the way of the dodo. What I do predict (not a hard prediction to make, methinks) is that literature is going the way of the opera. That process started long before computers and kindles landed in every lap."
-- Paul Verhaeghen
posted by dan at 6:05 AM
0 comments
'' LITERATURE IS GOING TO GO THE WAY OF OPERA'' a quote and idea by Paul Verhaeghen in Atlanta, brilliant idea. and sad too. maybe true?
'' LITERATURE IS GOING TO GO THE WAY OF OPERA'' -- a quote and idea by novelist, blogger and thinker Paul Verhaeghen in Atlanta, brilliant idea. And sad too. WHAT SAY YOU? (leave comments below, o ye who love books and literature!)
maybe true?
posted by dan at 5:43 AM
1 comments
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Technology Today at MIT: letter to editor by Danny Bloom RE reading on paper vs screening online
my brief LETTER TO THE EDITOR was printed today in the Nov.-Dec double issue of Technology Review at MIT: (thank you Jason Pontin and Matt Mahoney)
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/23697/
Letters from Our Readers
The Way We Read Now
[Editor's note: One reader was intrigued by the potential of a new pressure-sensitive touch screen ("A Touch of Ingenuity," September/October 2009) that could be used in e-readers.]
Dear Editor,
I wonder if in the future we might need a new word to differentiate the kind of reading we do on computer or e-reader screens from the kind of reading we do on paper. I have heard a few new terms being bandied about on the Internet: screen-reading, browsing, skimming, scanning, even "diging." Reading is reading, of course. But we might not be "reading" the new and improved newspapers and magazines of the future. We might be "screening" them.
Dan Bloom
Taiwan
posted by dan at 10:25 PM
1 comments
Motoko Rich Lives Blogs Barnes & Noble E-Reader Launch of the Nookie
October 20, 2009 , 4:15 pm
Live Blog: Barnes & Noble Unveils E-Reader
By Motoko Rich
JB Reed/Bloomberg
William Lynch, chief executive of bn.com, unveils the company’s new e-reader, the Nook, on Tuesday.
The Announcement is Over | 4:51 p.m. “Ladies and gentlemen, the bar is now open.” The media is asked to remain for a Q and A session. We’ll have more for you later.
Larry Kirshbaum, literary agent, says of the Nook, “I think it’s a home run.”
Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesUpdate | 4:45 p.m. Cases are being made by Kate Spade, Jack Spade, Jonathan Adler and Tahari. A screen at the back of the stage opens to reveal a huge kiosk display that will appear in Barnes & Noble stores to sell the Nook. The Nook will be sold by 40,000 booksellers across 1,300 stores. Customers will also be shown how to read Barnes & Noble’s e-books on iPhone and Blackberry devices.
Update | 4:40 p.m. Malcolm Gladwell just showed up and started reading from a chapter from his book, “The Tipping Point” on the Nook and walked off the stage to cheers.
“Just to be clear, Malcolm Gladwell does not come with the Nook,” said Tony Astarita, the vice president of device development at bn.com. The first 10,000 customers to order the Nook get a complementary e-copy of “The Tipping Point.”
Update | 4:38 p.m. The control panel features a virtual keyboard, and no physical buttons. When you don’t need it the control panel goes dark so you are not distracted while reading. You can customize your reading experience by using up to five fonts you can add pictures, music, audiobooks, Adobe pdf documents to your collection on the nook.
Update | 4:34 p.m. Applause and cheers after the video. Larry Kirschbaum, an agent and former C.E.O. of Warner books quips “people are happy to have a competitor” to the Kindle.
Update | 4:33 p.m. Any book, any time, anywhere. Sounds like the Kindle - that was the intro line of their video to show the nook
Update | 4:32 p.m. Users can buy subscriptions to magazines and newspapers on Nook, says William Lynch, C.E.O. of bn.com.
Running Behind Schedule | 4:17 p.m. The press conference that was supposed to start at 4:15 p.m. sharp, is running late. About 300 people are gathered. Steve Riggio, C.E.O. of Barnes & Noble, is waiting at the front of the room, as is William Lynch, C.E.O. of bn.com.
The Announcement | 4:15 p.m. Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader, expected to be unveiled on Tuesday at a news conference in Manhattan, features Wi-Fi connectivity and the ability for customers to lend out e-books for 14 days at a time.
With the market for electronic readers and digital books heating up by the day, Barnes & Noble sought to differentiate itself with the wireless feature that consumers can access in any of the chain’s 1,300 stores. Outside of the stores, customers can download books on AT&T’s 3G cellular phone network.
The Nook features a six inch grey and white reading display and color touch-screen controls at the bottom of the device. The price is $259, matching the latest price set by Amazon for a new edition of its Kindle reader.
Customers can begin pre-ordering the Nook at nook.com starting at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, and the devices will ship in late November.
In an interview, William Lynch, chief executive of BN.com, said that the Nook’s color touch screen navigation panel could be used to find books, search through a user’s personal library, annotate text and change font size. Readers will be able to scroll through icons of the covers of their books rather than just a text list, as on Kindle.
Mr. Lynch said the company would also leverage its chain of bricks and mortar stores by setting up front-of-store displays to sell and demonstrate the Nook. The Nook also has software that will detect when a consumer walks into a store so that it can push out coupons or other promotions such as excerpts or suggestions to customers.
Because of this connection with stores and the brand name, analysts said that Barnes & Noble could fare better than other newcomers to the e-reader market like iRex or Plastic Logic, because of its name recognition. “Barnes & Noble has more of a chance than any of the new entrants to the market,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Our data shows that the prospects for e-reader devices are book-buying consumers, and many consumers still have a relationship with Barnes & Noble. They need to leverage those relationships before it’s too late to seize their part of the e-book market.”
Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the Nook is that it allows consumers to share their e-books with friends. Mr. Lynch said that customers will be allowed to share an individual e-book with one person at a time for up to 14 days. After that, they will not be allowed to share that book again, though, so it is not an exact mirror of the physical book world.
Amazon allows consumers to connect up to six devices to a single Kindle account. Kindle books can be read either on the Kindle device or on Apple’s iPhone.
For publishers, “it’s in their interest to let Barnes & Noble do things that Amazon doesn’t or can’t do,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consultant to publishers and technology vendors. “And lending is one of those things.”
Ms. Epps added that lending is what consumers already do with physical books. “It’s bringing the intimacy and sociability of reading into the digital realm,” she said.
The Nook is being made by an undisclosed manufacturer in Asia, Mr. Lynch said. He declined to say how many devices the company had manufactured for the upcoming holiday season.
The digital books in Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore are available in either epub or Adobe Pdf format. Customers who want to buy books in those formats from other digital bookstores may do so and transfer them onto the Nook, but those who want to buy e-books directly from the device will be connected to Barnes & Noble’s own bookstore.
Barnes & Noble will continue to supply the e-bookstores of the forthcoming iRex and Plastic Logic devices.
Mr. Lynch said that he was not concerned that the Nook would eventually cannibalize print book sales in the chain’s stores.
“We think it presents a huge opportunity for Barnes and Noble to grow our business as some of the business shifts,” Mr. Lynch said. He noted that the overall book business was worth about $30 billion a year. “Even the most bullish prognostications on digital have it getting to $5 billion within four to five years,” he said. “So it’s still a very small part of the overall market.”
The Pre-Announcement Hoopla | 4:05 p.m. We’re waiting for Barnes & Noble to unveil its new Nook e-reader. Press, publishers, tech heads are arriving at Pier 60 at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. Despite the beautiful fall day outside, we are stuck in a windowless room with loud music playing over the loudspeakers. The news conference is expected to start at 4:15 p.m.
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15 Comments
1. October 20, 2009
4:38 pm
Link
I think the Nook e-reader (aka nookie reader) is a fantastic idea! it will lead to more of a paper-free green society and who doesn’t like a little nookie reading?
— Nytco
2. October 20, 2009
4:50 pm
Link
“a complementary e-copy”
You’ve probably been told a gazillion times already, but that should be “a complimentary e-copy … “
— Albert Lewis
3. October 20, 2009
4:53 pm
Link
Are they out of their minds with such a name. In the UK and Australia the word “nookie” is a slang term for intercourse. So what would my folks think if instead of saying that I was going to read a book I said that I was going to have a nookie.
They need to change the name - and fast - if it is to get international appeal.
— John Dulley
4. October 20, 2009
4:55 pm
Link
Dang! You beat me to it!
— Patricia
5. October 20, 2009
4:56 pm
Link
As long as these tools continue to use DRM so that we can’t give the virtual book away or sell it just like a paperback I shall never buy one. Publishers since the 1800s if not longer have wanted a way to sell books that can’t be resold, if they shift entirely paperless they will have finally got their way. What is even more ridiculous is that if the books are like audio ones they’ll charge MORE for it despite the inability to sell it/give away than real books go for despite the fact that they like ZERO overhead on digital things. Don’t be suckered people.
— Robocoastie
6. October 20, 2009
5:05 pm
Link
This is an overpriced non-starter for me until I can borrow the ebooks from the library.
— Another Dad
7. October 20, 2009
5:08 pm
Link
How does an author submit a book? It was very easy with the Kindle.
Davis Straub
http://ozreport.com
http://ozreport.com/worldrecordholder.php
http://ozreport.com/location.php
Cathedral City, CA, USA
— Davis Straub
8. October 20, 2009
5:08 pm
Link
I agree Nook is cool, but your assumption that ereaders–with all of their manufacturing and their eternal electricity draw–are greener than books may be flawed. Once a book is made, it never taps the grid again!
— JBK
9. October 20, 2009
5:30 pm
Link
Barnes & Noble’s iPhone app is decidedly crippled in its capabilities compared to Amazon’s Kindle software. Has anyone yet compared the reading experiences? Does the software save your place in each book for instance? Looking forward to learning more about how the Nook operates.
— Ann Hyatt Logan
10. October 20, 2009
6:05 pm
Link
#6 Dad: You can check out ebooks from libraries. Check your local branch to see if they’ve jumped aboard the ebook train. I have a Sony 505, which I was surprised by how much more I enjoy reading on than paper books, and I can check out ebooks from my local library, both at the branch and at home using the Sony Reader software (kind of like iTunes for ebooks).
— BackToWork
11. October 20, 2009
6:09 pm
Link
#9 Ann, All ereaders on the market save your place and even allow you to set multiple bookmarks within a book. Most ereaders on the market are essentially the same rebranded hardware, so the features aren’t very different from model to model.
The Kindle doesn’t allow sharing and is limited in the formats it supports, while the Nook does allow sharing and supports more formats. So how is the Nook crippled in comparison to the Kindle?
— BackToWork
12. October 20, 2009
6:17 pm
Link
I am vitally interested in whether or not B&N’s reader will allow B&N or any other entity to examine the contents of my bookshelf, or alter it, once I have “purchased” a book. This will determine whether or not I will consider using it.
The incident in which Amazon removed copies of George Orwell’s “1984″ from Kindles made a deep impact on me as a potential customer.
To me, a book is more than just words on a page or a screen. In theory, I can live with a DRM scheme that exists solely to insure that authors are paid for their work. But if the same scheme requires me to give up my ownership of a book, or the privacy of my bookshelf, then I will not be a customer.
What’s been reported in this posting doesn’t answer those questions, so I will hold off on forming an opinion until I get the answers.
— CWP
13. October 20, 2009
6:50 pm
Link
I hadn’t thought about the inability to sell or give away ebooks. Not too sure it is relevent since you can get older books for almost nothing online. I think the thing that people are overlooking is that you can read books on your laptop. I have a tablet laptop and I get Adobe digital pdf ebooks for their reader which is in book form and also lets you have a library of book covers to choose from. I like the idea of using your computer because you are not limited to a sellers ideas of what to read. Until you can download any format any book I will not buy a seperate reader.
— Peggy
14. October 20, 2009
6:54 pm
Link
I can hear the emotion in some peoples comments already. they choose one bookreader and are loyal to death. If a book reader is to be competitive it has to save your place. The readers on computer do so. MSreader and Adobe have all the bells and whistles and they are free on your laptop or desktop. I think those people who don’t have computers are the ones getting the shaft they pay almost as much for a book reader as a computer these days.
— Peggy
15. October 20, 2009
7:10 pm
Link
Actually, after a paper book is published it still taps the grid, for example, when a reading light is needed. the green question is not as simple a comparison as you’d think.
— APR
16. October 21, 2009
12:52 am
Link
Your comment is awaiting moderation. DANNY BLOOM
Can I chime in here with “The Hogwash Statement” — It’s about the future of reading:
The point of all this is not so much to coin a new word — God knows
there are enough neologisms already, the reading field surely doesn’t
need a new word for “reading” if “reading” is fine for “reading on a
computer screen” — and for all that I care, the new word could be
“hogwash”, as in “I’m hogwashing ‘Moby Dick’ on my Kindle tonight” –
so the real point of my public crusade/campaign to search for a new
word (if needed, and if useful!) is to point out the need for scholars
and scientists to study the very real differences between reading on
paper and reading on screens, and not just with learned opinions and
surveys, but with hard science — that is to
say, MRI brain scan studies in laboratory settings and hospital rooms
to study — firsthand! up close and personal! — white matter and grey
matter neural pathways and try to ascertain if reading on paper
surfaces lights up different parts of the brain compared to reading on
a screen.
That is all this campaign is about. I don’t care to coin a
new name for reading on screens. I am not a name coiner. I have no
interest in coining a new word for screen-reading. If a new word or term
does come to us, great. If not, that’s okay, too. All I want to do
is to egg scientists and
neuro-scientists on to study these issues with MRI scan tissues. Then we will
really know what the differences between paper reading and screen
reading really mean.
Question: Why am I so concerned and seemingly obsessed about this? I
worry about the future of human civilization! If screen-reading turns
out to be a bit inferior to paper reading — in terms of which parts
of the brain light up for things like processing info, retention,
analysis, critical thinking, empathy, digesting, internalizing,
understanding, etc — then we need to know this.
That’s my hunch. That’s all I want to know. Let the brain scans begin!
Live Blog: Barnes & Noble Unveils E-Reader
By Motoko Rich
JB Reed/Bloomberg
William Lynch, chief executive of bn.com, unveils the company’s new e-reader, the Nook, on Tuesday.
The Announcement is Over | 4:51 p.m. “Ladies and gentlemen, the bar is now open.” The media is asked to remain for a Q and A session. We’ll have more for you later.
Larry Kirshbaum, literary agent, says of the Nook, “I think it’s a home run.”
Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesUpdate | 4:45 p.m. Cases are being made by Kate Spade, Jack Spade, Jonathan Adler and Tahari. A screen at the back of the stage opens to reveal a huge kiosk display that will appear in Barnes & Noble stores to sell the Nook. The Nook will be sold by 40,000 booksellers across 1,300 stores. Customers will also be shown how to read Barnes & Noble’s e-books on iPhone and Blackberry devices.
Update | 4:40 p.m. Malcolm Gladwell just showed up and started reading from a chapter from his book, “The Tipping Point” on the Nook and walked off the stage to cheers.
“Just to be clear, Malcolm Gladwell does not come with the Nook,” said Tony Astarita, the vice president of device development at bn.com. The first 10,000 customers to order the Nook get a complementary e-copy of “The Tipping Point.”
Update | 4:38 p.m. The control panel features a virtual keyboard, and no physical buttons. When you don’t need it the control panel goes dark so you are not distracted while reading. You can customize your reading experience by using up to five fonts you can add pictures, music, audiobooks, Adobe pdf documents to your collection on the nook.
Update | 4:34 p.m. Applause and cheers after the video. Larry Kirschbaum, an agent and former C.E.O. of Warner books quips “people are happy to have a competitor” to the Kindle.
Update | 4:33 p.m. Any book, any time, anywhere. Sounds like the Kindle - that was the intro line of their video to show the nook
Update | 4:32 p.m. Users can buy subscriptions to magazines and newspapers on Nook, says William Lynch, C.E.O. of bn.com.
Running Behind Schedule | 4:17 p.m. The press conference that was supposed to start at 4:15 p.m. sharp, is running late. About 300 people are gathered. Steve Riggio, C.E.O. of Barnes & Noble, is waiting at the front of the room, as is William Lynch, C.E.O. of bn.com.
The Announcement | 4:15 p.m. Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader, expected to be unveiled on Tuesday at a news conference in Manhattan, features Wi-Fi connectivity and the ability for customers to lend out e-books for 14 days at a time.
With the market for electronic readers and digital books heating up by the day, Barnes & Noble sought to differentiate itself with the wireless feature that consumers can access in any of the chain’s 1,300 stores. Outside of the stores, customers can download books on AT&T’s 3G cellular phone network.
The Nook features a six inch grey and white reading display and color touch-screen controls at the bottom of the device. The price is $259, matching the latest price set by Amazon for a new edition of its Kindle reader.
Customers can begin pre-ordering the Nook at nook.com starting at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, and the devices will ship in late November.
In an interview, William Lynch, chief executive of BN.com, said that the Nook’s color touch screen navigation panel could be used to find books, search through a user’s personal library, annotate text and change font size. Readers will be able to scroll through icons of the covers of their books rather than just a text list, as on Kindle.
Mr. Lynch said the company would also leverage its chain of bricks and mortar stores by setting up front-of-store displays to sell and demonstrate the Nook. The Nook also has software that will detect when a consumer walks into a store so that it can push out coupons or other promotions such as excerpts or suggestions to customers.
Because of this connection with stores and the brand name, analysts said that Barnes & Noble could fare better than other newcomers to the e-reader market like iRex or Plastic Logic, because of its name recognition. “Barnes & Noble has more of a chance than any of the new entrants to the market,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Our data shows that the prospects for e-reader devices are book-buying consumers, and many consumers still have a relationship with Barnes & Noble. They need to leverage those relationships before it’s too late to seize their part of the e-book market.”
Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the Nook is that it allows consumers to share their e-books with friends. Mr. Lynch said that customers will be allowed to share an individual e-book with one person at a time for up to 14 days. After that, they will not be allowed to share that book again, though, so it is not an exact mirror of the physical book world.
Amazon allows consumers to connect up to six devices to a single Kindle account. Kindle books can be read either on the Kindle device or on Apple’s iPhone.
For publishers, “it’s in their interest to let Barnes & Noble do things that Amazon doesn’t or can’t do,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consultant to publishers and technology vendors. “And lending is one of those things.”
Ms. Epps added that lending is what consumers already do with physical books. “It’s bringing the intimacy and sociability of reading into the digital realm,” she said.
The Nook is being made by an undisclosed manufacturer in Asia, Mr. Lynch said. He declined to say how many devices the company had manufactured for the upcoming holiday season.
The digital books in Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore are available in either epub or Adobe Pdf format. Customers who want to buy books in those formats from other digital bookstores may do so and transfer them onto the Nook, but those who want to buy e-books directly from the device will be connected to Barnes & Noble’s own bookstore.
Barnes & Noble will continue to supply the e-bookstores of the forthcoming iRex and Plastic Logic devices.
Mr. Lynch said that he was not concerned that the Nook would eventually cannibalize print book sales in the chain’s stores.
“We think it presents a huge opportunity for Barnes and Noble to grow our business as some of the business shifts,” Mr. Lynch said. He noted that the overall book business was worth about $30 billion a year. “Even the most bullish prognostications on digital have it getting to $5 billion within four to five years,” he said. “So it’s still a very small part of the overall market.”
The Pre-Announcement Hoopla | 4:05 p.m. We’re waiting for Barnes & Noble to unveil its new Nook e-reader. Press, publishers, tech heads are arriving at Pier 60 at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. Despite the beautiful fall day outside, we are stuck in a windowless room with loud music playing over the loudspeakers. The news conference is expected to start at 4:15 p.m.
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My Space
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From Bits
Barnes & Noble E-Reader Could Come Oct. 20 With Lending Options Amazon.com Introduces Same-Day DeliverySteve Jobs on Amazon and Ice CreamA First Look at Amazon’s Kindle App for the iPhone
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Previous post
Venture Investment Increases for Some Start-Ups
Next post
Ning Opens a Virtual Gift Shop With Custom-Made Gifts
15 Comments
1. October 20, 2009
4:38 pm
Link
I think the Nook e-reader (aka nookie reader) is a fantastic idea! it will lead to more of a paper-free green society and who doesn’t like a little nookie reading?
— Nytco
2. October 20, 2009
4:50 pm
Link
“a complementary e-copy”
You’ve probably been told a gazillion times already, but that should be “a complimentary e-copy … “
— Albert Lewis
3. October 20, 2009
4:53 pm
Link
Are they out of their minds with such a name. In the UK and Australia the word “nookie” is a slang term for intercourse. So what would my folks think if instead of saying that I was going to read a book I said that I was going to have a nookie.
They need to change the name - and fast - if it is to get international appeal.
— John Dulley
4. October 20, 2009
4:55 pm
Link
Dang! You beat me to it!
— Patricia
5. October 20, 2009
4:56 pm
Link
As long as these tools continue to use DRM so that we can’t give the virtual book away or sell it just like a paperback I shall never buy one. Publishers since the 1800s if not longer have wanted a way to sell books that can’t be resold, if they shift entirely paperless they will have finally got their way. What is even more ridiculous is that if the books are like audio ones they’ll charge MORE for it despite the inability to sell it/give away than real books go for despite the fact that they like ZERO overhead on digital things. Don’t be suckered people.
— Robocoastie
6. October 20, 2009
5:05 pm
Link
This is an overpriced non-starter for me until I can borrow the ebooks from the library.
— Another Dad
7. October 20, 2009
5:08 pm
Link
How does an author submit a book? It was very easy with the Kindle.
Davis Straub
http://ozreport.com
http://ozreport.com/worldrecordholder.php
http://ozreport.com/location.php
Cathedral City, CA, USA
— Davis Straub
8. October 20, 2009
5:08 pm
Link
I agree Nook is cool, but your assumption that ereaders–with all of their manufacturing and their eternal electricity draw–are greener than books may be flawed. Once a book is made, it never taps the grid again!
— JBK
9. October 20, 2009
5:30 pm
Link
Barnes & Noble’s iPhone app is decidedly crippled in its capabilities compared to Amazon’s Kindle software. Has anyone yet compared the reading experiences? Does the software save your place in each book for instance? Looking forward to learning more about how the Nook operates.
— Ann Hyatt Logan
10. October 20, 2009
6:05 pm
Link
#6 Dad: You can check out ebooks from libraries. Check your local branch to see if they’ve jumped aboard the ebook train. I have a Sony 505, which I was surprised by how much more I enjoy reading on than paper books, and I can check out ebooks from my local library, both at the branch and at home using the Sony Reader software (kind of like iTunes for ebooks).
— BackToWork
11. October 20, 2009
6:09 pm
Link
#9 Ann, All ereaders on the market save your place and even allow you to set multiple bookmarks within a book. Most ereaders on the market are essentially the same rebranded hardware, so the features aren’t very different from model to model.
The Kindle doesn’t allow sharing and is limited in the formats it supports, while the Nook does allow sharing and supports more formats. So how is the Nook crippled in comparison to the Kindle?
— BackToWork
12. October 20, 2009
6:17 pm
Link
I am vitally interested in whether or not B&N’s reader will allow B&N or any other entity to examine the contents of my bookshelf, or alter it, once I have “purchased” a book. This will determine whether or not I will consider using it.
The incident in which Amazon removed copies of George Orwell’s “1984″ from Kindles made a deep impact on me as a potential customer.
To me, a book is more than just words on a page or a screen. In theory, I can live with a DRM scheme that exists solely to insure that authors are paid for their work. But if the same scheme requires me to give up my ownership of a book, or the privacy of my bookshelf, then I will not be a customer.
What’s been reported in this posting doesn’t answer those questions, so I will hold off on forming an opinion until I get the answers.
— CWP
13. October 20, 2009
6:50 pm
Link
I hadn’t thought about the inability to sell or give away ebooks. Not too sure it is relevent since you can get older books for almost nothing online. I think the thing that people are overlooking is that you can read books on your laptop. I have a tablet laptop and I get Adobe digital pdf ebooks for their reader which is in book form and also lets you have a library of book covers to choose from. I like the idea of using your computer because you are not limited to a sellers ideas of what to read. Until you can download any format any book I will not buy a seperate reader.
— Peggy
14. October 20, 2009
6:54 pm
Link
I can hear the emotion in some peoples comments already. they choose one bookreader and are loyal to death. If a book reader is to be competitive it has to save your place. The readers on computer do so. MSreader and Adobe have all the bells and whistles and they are free on your laptop or desktop. I think those people who don’t have computers are the ones getting the shaft they pay almost as much for a book reader as a computer these days.
— Peggy
15. October 20, 2009
7:10 pm
Link
Actually, after a paper book is published it still taps the grid, for example, when a reading light is needed. the green question is not as simple a comparison as you’d think.
— APR
16. October 21, 2009
12:52 am
Link
Your comment is awaiting moderation. DANNY BLOOM
Can I chime in here with “The Hogwash Statement” — It’s about the future of reading:
The point of all this is not so much to coin a new word — God knows
there are enough neologisms already, the reading field surely doesn’t
need a new word for “reading” if “reading” is fine for “reading on a
computer screen” — and for all that I care, the new word could be
“hogwash”, as in “I’m hogwashing ‘Moby Dick’ on my Kindle tonight” –
so the real point of my public crusade/campaign to search for a new
word (if needed, and if useful!) is to point out the need for scholars
and scientists to study the very real differences between reading on
paper and reading on screens, and not just with learned opinions and
surveys, but with hard science — that is to
say, MRI brain scan studies in laboratory settings and hospital rooms
to study — firsthand! up close and personal! — white matter and grey
matter neural pathways and try to ascertain if reading on paper
surfaces lights up different parts of the brain compared to reading on
a screen.
That is all this campaign is about. I don’t care to coin a
new name for reading on screens. I am not a name coiner. I have no
interest in coining a new word for screen-reading. If a new word or term
does come to us, great. If not, that’s okay, too. All I want to do
is to egg scientists and
neuro-scientists on to study these issues with MRI scan tissues. Then we will
really know what the differences between paper reading and screen
reading really mean.
Question: Why am I so concerned and seemingly obsessed about this? I
worry about the future of human civilization! If screen-reading turns
out to be a bit inferior to paper reading — in terms of which parts
of the brain light up for things like processing info, retention,
analysis, critical thinking, empathy, digesting, internalizing,
understanding, etc — then we need to know this.
That’s my hunch. That’s all I want to know. Let the brain scans begin!
posted by dan at 9:57 PM
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