The Digital Reader |
- The Morning Coffee – 10 March 2014
- US Libraries Spend More on Audiobooks, DVDs than eBooks
- Chitika : Samsung Now Accounts for Over Half of Android Web Traffic
- Booksellers, Publishers Shocked that the LA Times Festival of Books Could Value Money Over Book Culture
| The Morning Coffee – 10 March 2014 Posted: 09 Mar 2014 09:33 PM PDT Top stories this Monday morning include a look at the horrible fine print for the Amtrak writing fellowship (link), the story I should have written about the LA Times Festival of Books (link), how Smashwords authors can opt out of Scribd (link), an interview of the founder of Medium (link), and more.
The post The Morning Coffee – 10 March 2014 appeared first on The Digital Reader. |
| US Libraries Spend More on Audiobooks, DVDs than eBooks Posted: 09 Mar 2014 05:15 PM PDT Library The Materials Survey 2014 looks at what each library spends to acquire new content, and it’s based on voluntary participation from US public libraries. The survey group includes a diverse bunch of libraries with budgets ranging from $22,000 a year to $6.3 million a year which serve a broad range of populations from over a million people in a metro area to under 10,000. The survey found that paper books made up an average of 59% of libraries’ budgets, with DVDs (12%), audiobooks (8%), ebooks (7%), and other digital material (7%) making up most of the rest of the budget. The average materials budget was up 1.5% last year, and circulation was up 2%.
As you can see in the infographic above, the survey also shows that ebook spending trended up and audiobook spending trended down as the size of libraries increased. The largest libraries were much more likely to offer downloadable movies, while the smallest libraries (those serving a population below 10,000) devoted a larger share of their acquisition budgets to paper books than larger libraries, averaging 73% spent on paper books vs an average of 59% for all libraries. The smallest libraries were also the least likely to have an ebook collection, with only 2/3 reporting that they had ebooks they could lend (vs an average of over 90% of participating libraries). They also averaged a greater share spent on audiobooks, though with a difference of only a few percentage points this is less important. In terns of long term trends spending on paper books held steady in 2013 at 59%, following a 7% drop over the past decade. eBook spending has increased over the past 5 years, especially over the past couple years where it averaged a 20% increase. image by musescore The post US Libraries Spend More on Audiobooks, DVDs than eBooks appeared first on The Digital Reader. |
| Chitika : Samsung Now Accounts for Over Half of Android Web Traffic Posted: 09 Mar 2014 11:30 AM PDT Samsung This ad network released a new report on Thursday, and it shows that Android smartphones and tablets made by Samsung account for 55% of Android web traffic. The report is based solely on ad impressions in North America so it is by no means a complete view of the tablet or smartphone market, but it does offer a peek at how mobile devices are being used. To quantify this latest study, Chitika Insights examined tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian online ad impressions generated within the Chitika network from February 20 through February 26, 2014. For the Nth year in a row, iThings accounted for the majority of mobile device web traffic, this time generating twice as many ad impressions as Android devices. (This isn’t a measure of all mobile web traffic, just iOS and Android, of course.) Of the remaining 35%, Samsung accounted for the single largest chunk, with their smartphones and tablets taking a 55.5% share.
Samsung's share of ad impressions has grown more than 8 percentage points since Chitika’s last report on the subject in July 2013. In the same time period, Amazon, Motorola, and HTC all lost between half a percentage point and 3.5 percentage points. Google showed the largest gain (2.1%) after Samsung, but the big surprise today was Barnes & Noble. Their share of ad impressions grew from 1.3% to 1.8%, giving them a larger share than many of the smaller device makers. Perhaps B&N’s numerous sales over the past 6 months have had a positive effect? Whatever the reason, it doesn’t appear to have affected the use of tablets and smartphones much; smartphones still make up a larger share of ad impressions than tablets. The post Chitika : Samsung Now Accounts for Over Half of Android Web Traffic appeared first on The Digital Reader. |
| Posted: 09 Mar 2014 08:53 AM PDT When As one bookseller put it: “I was alarmed to see the buy buttons and even more alarmed because so many local booksellers exhibit at the festival,” said Mary Williams, events coordinator at Skylight Books. Amazon is neither an exhibitor nor a sponsor of the festival, though they are in some ways a financial supporter. The book festival is an Amazon affiliate, and will earn a commission from any Amazon purchases made after you click that link. This is the latest installment of a long running argument concerning whether (as one side would argue) one should support local bookstores or (as the other side would argue) make it easy for readers to buy books. That is what many have asked for this past week:
This blogger is usually not one to take sides in this argument, though I am on the side of readers, but in this case I think that the booksellers do have a point in that the book festival erred in linking to Amazon.com. I’m not going to argue that the book festival should have linked to LA bookstores; as The Passive Voice explained when a similar discussion occurred in June 2013, that is a silly idea:
One could perhaps argue that the book festival should link to a central site where readers from all over could search for and find their local bookstore. This is a good idea, and there is a page for this on the American Bookseller Association’s website. Unfortunately, the ABA’s search page simply does not work, rendering this suggestion moot. Also, it does not include all bookstores in the US, much less the world, so even if it did work this would not be an ideal solution. At this point I am sure many readers will assume that by eliminating the alternatives the only option left is to link to Amazon so readers can find and buy an author’s books. Well, no, and here is where both the book festival and the local booksellers got it wrong. While it’s simply not practical for the book festival to find all of the sites where each author’s works are for sale, much less crowd the page with links, there is a better option. The book festival’s long term goal is a literary focus (more so than a commercial focus), and as such it should promote book culture, reading, and all that jazz. The goal should be to connect readers with authors, not to connect readers with retailers. In short, the book festival’s true error was not that they linked to Amazon, but that they neglected to link to each author’s website. This is an unfortunate oversight, but luckily it is also one which can readily be repaired. This would not only resolve the bookseller’s complaint about linking to Amazon, it would also better serve the purpose of the book festival and it would be more useful to readers. Of course, most of those authors also link to Amazon first, but that is another matter. The post Booksellers, Publishers Shocked that the LA Times Festival of Books Could Value Money Over Book Culture appeared first on The Digital Reader. |
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