E-textbook company Kno has popped out a press release saying that it found 95% of college students who used its e-textbook application “found it very useful and plan to use it again”. The company conducted a study with four California community colleges, on 400 students and faculty in 27 classes using an open-source statistics textbook. "It is exciting to see the book brought to life through digital enhancements by Kno," said Barbara Illowsky, a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, De Anza College [and co-author of the statistics textbook]. "The student feedback reinforces the need for...

EBookNewser and GalleyCat have posted an infographic from e-book sales tracking company Booklr which compares the average e-book price of the Top 100 e-books for the Kindle and Nook platforms. Based on information collected over the week of January 12th through 19th, the chart shows that the average price of an Amazon Kindle e-book is $6.48, whereas the average price of a B&N e-book is $8.94. The difference seems to be caused by fully 35% of Amazon’s titles being $1.99 or less, whereas none of B&N’s were. I wonder, though, whether this might be caused by Amazon counting...

PaidContent has a brief report on IDG Connect statistics suggesting that iPad owners are buying less physical media. The survey shows that 72% of worldwide professionals polled are buying fewer newspapers, 70% are buying fewer books, and 49% are buying fewer DVDs since owning an iPad. The biggest areas of decline for newspapers are Asia, with 90% of polled buying fewer, and the Middle East, with 80% buying fewer. This represents a bit of a double-whammy for ad-funded media like newspapers and magazines—not only are they getting fewer sales, but they’re also losing the print ad views of the...

Forbes reports that the Kindle Fire may be “more profitable than expected” despite being (allegedly) sold at a loss. A market research company polled 216 Kindle Fire owners and determined that the average Kindle Fire owner will purchase $136 in digital goods over the lifetime of the device, giving it a cumulative operating margin of over 20%. Of course, as Nate Hoffelder points out at eBookNewser, this is just an estimate. And for that matter, 216 Kindle Fire owners is a remarkably small sample size considering just how many of them Amazon is estimated to have sold. ...

A report on PaidContent suggests that many readers of the News of the World Sunday paper, which shut down in July amidst the News Corp phone-hacking scandal, have not switched to reading any other Sunday newspapers. The National Readership Survey estimated that 7,217,000 people read the paper in the period from January through June of this year, Of that number, 4,342,000 did not read any other Sunday paper. Subsequently, total readership of national Sunday papers fell from 19,221,000 to 15,859,000—meaning that 3,362,000 people stopped reading Sunday papers altogether. The article doesn’t speculate on the causes, and at...

A recent survey by the Association of Magazine Publishers has turned up some interesting results. It surveyed 1,009 adult readers of e-magazines on their use habits and features they would like to see. Of those surveyed, 90% said they read as much or more magazine content as before they had a tablet. 76% of them said they preferred newsstand-style subscription centers, like Zinio or Apple’s Newsstand, and 55% said they like to be able to read back issues. But the intriguing part has to do with in-app purchase features. 70% of those surveyed wanted to be able...

Speaking of the Kindle Fire, CNet reports that analyst Richard Shim of market research firm DisplaySearch is projecting that Amazon will ship 6 million of the tablets this quarter. Shim said the timeline for manufacturer build plans was originally at 4 million units. "Shortly after preorders they upped it to 5 [million]," Shim said. "Then, about a week and a half ago as they were getting closer to the actual launch date, they upped it to 6 [million]." The Kindle Fire went on sale November 15. Meanwhile, production numbers on the iPad 2...

Amazon is losing $50 on each Kindle Fire it sells! No, wait—it’s only losing $10! No, wait—it’s making $50 on each device! No, wait—it’s actually losing $2.70! That last is the latest word from IHS’s iSuppli Teardown Analysis Service, which has ostensibly priced each component plus manufacturing costs and come up with a total of $201.70 for the $199 device. Does anyone even believe these estimates anymore? It would be interesting to compare the various different teardowns on a spreadsheet and see how each one priced each component. (I’d do it myself, but I don’t have time right...

PaidContent reports that the Wall Street Journal is going to begin running e-book bestseller lists. The lists will cover combined e-book and physical sales and e-book sales only for both fiction and non-fiction books. This will include self-published titles. The most interesting thing about this move is that the lists will be based on data from Nielsen BookScan, which has tracked paper book sales but has not publicly tracked e-book sales before now. The New York Times runs a similar set of print plus e- and e- only bestseller lists, but they use data from a different...

PaidContent has a look at the various estimates and leaks of Kindle Fire pre-order numbers. One estimate places the number of Kindle Fire pre-orders at 95,000 on the first day (and orders for the other three new Kindles totaling 25,000); another claims a “verified source” leaked a figure of 254,074 Kindle Fires ordered in the first five days (and 20,249 Kindle Touch WiFi, 12,467 Kindle Touch 3G) supposedly based on screenshots from Amazon’s internal inventory system. Needless to say, these estimates aren’t necessarily reliable, but since we’ll never know what the real numbers are, they’re all we really...

A survey from Harris Interactive turns up some very interesting facts about current e-book usage. The survey notes that 15%, or about 1 out of every 6 people, own an e-book reader (up from only about half that last year), and another 15% consider themselves likely to buy one within the next six months. It also finds people who own e-readers both read more and buy more books than non-owners, and suggests the devices are by and large good for the book market in general. One of the criticisms of e-Readers is that people who...

It’s an old story: as automation gets better, it makes it possible to eliminate jobs and save money. It’s an old story in the physical manufacturing industry, But until recently, writers would have thought they were safe. But progress marches on. The New York Times has a lengthy article about a computerized article writer that takes statistics and turns them into prose. It can be used on sports games, financial reports, and other statistics that lend themselves to forming narratives. The leaders of Narrative Science emphasized that their technology would be primarily a low-cost...