At PaidContent, Laura Hazard Owen reports on the recent Verso study that showed over half of book buyers are “not at all likely” to buy an e-reader in the next year, up from 2009. Owen talked to representatives from Verso who suggested that, to the resistant, e-readers aren’t yet better enough than print books to suit them, they don’t like reading off of screens, and they like being able to rummage through books in physical stores to find new books they might never otherwise have considered. She also notes that teenagers lag behind other age groups in e-book adoption,...

Self-publishing author Will Entrekin has written a very interesting blog post about his participation in Amazon’s “Kindle Select” program, in which his books are made available exclusively on Amazon and are part of the Amazon Prime Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. In the first part, he talks about why he made the decision to go exclusive with Amazon. It boiled down to having greater comfort developing for Amazon’s platform, and liking the kind of control Amazon gave him over the presentation of his book that he didn’t feel he could get with Barnes & Noble. (And also, he never...

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...

Jeremy Greenfield reports on the Digital Book World site that Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of social e-tailer Anobii, is urging publishers to drop DRM restrictions on their e-books as a way to fight Amazon. In a DBW slideshow presentation, Berlucchi argues that the big e-vendors use device choice to lock in consumers, licensing rather than selling e-books and offering inferior functionality to that of paper books. Berlucchi calls attention to the actions of the music industry in recent years, eliminating DRM and permitting ownership of music—you can now even import songs bought on one platform into a competitor’s via cloud...

On UpstartHR.com, which appears to be a blog dedicated to the theory and practice of human resources, a blogger identified only as “Ben” has written an interesting post about how and why he reads at least one book per week. Ben believes that reading books is extremely helpful to anyone with an HR career (and, indeed, anyone in general). He explains that books can help improve you in every aspect of your life by allowing you to learn from the mistakes of others without having to make them yourself. (He also links to a site called Personal MBA, which is...

Remember that clever little stop-motion bookstore video that smugly concludes, “There’s nothing quite like a real book”? On Urban Times, Kosal Kong writes a great piece in response to this closing contention. Kong covers the history of the e-book and why “[s]ome sectors of the book world find [them] scary.” She does admit that works about or that are art are indeed better in print than electronic form. However, for the bulk of books, the medium is not the message.  Rather, the most important aspect of the book is the text, the content. It’s the...

On Wired’s Epicenter blog, Tim Carmody writes about why he thinks that the main global e-book competitor Amazon has to worry about is Kobo. He points out that while Amazon and Apple have been making highly visible splashes with their new hardware or e-publishing initiatives, Kobo has quietly been building support from a multinational network of bookseller partners, including major booksellers in England, Hong Kong, and France. And now its acquisition by Rakuten adds all of Rakuten’s previously-existing worldwide digital book and media operations to the Kobo brand. “An e-book reader will ultimately not be only...

A lot of attention has been given to sub-$100 e-readers such as the new crop of Kindles. But a report from PaidContent suggests another generation of sub-$100 devices might be on the horizon: the sub-$100 smartphone. PaidContent reports that consultants at Deloitte see an impending wave of cheap smartphones hitting the market—as many as 500 million of them by the end of the year. By and large, these will not be Android, iOS, RIM, Symbian, or Windows Phone based phones, but rather they will run on closed, proprietary platforms. Most consumers care more about touchscreens or keyboards than...

Is the e-reader doomed? According to Matt Alexander on The Loop, it might just be on its way out as tablets get better and better. Alexander’s argument basically boils down to the fact that e-ink is an intermediate step, a necessary compromise between readability and display quality. E-ink is evolving toward being able to present color and full motion video, he suggests—and when you have an e-reader that can do that, it won’t be an e-reader anymore, but rather a tablet. And really, the naming of these devices, the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet/Color,...

Author Richard F. Miniter has an article about the revolution in home-schooling that e-readers make possible. His idea is that children can be kept home, away from the faux-egalitarian, inaccurate-propaganda-laden classroom and taught to educate themselves on their own by reading a book a day and writing an essay on it. He brings up the example of a special-education foster child he’d cared for who was essentially unable to read, but who ended up testing at or above his grade level a year later after a course of home-schooling that consisted of daily reading with help on words he...

Our founder David Rothman wrote an interesting column on how to use e-books as part of an educational strategy for encouraging children to read. He suggests that parents should aim for a mix of electronic and paper books, using paper books as “gateway drugs” to get kids interested and e-books for times when paper books are not available or appropriate. He also suggests that developers should look into different ways of using e-book content to make it more effective for learning. The effectiveness of the actual books for children is just one issue. As part of...

The Wall Street Journal article on e-book sticker shock that we covered a couple of days ago has been drawing a number of reactions. CBS Marketwatch offers a piece noting that the high e-book prices are slowing the growth of the industry. It points out that e-book prices have implications for e-reader prices, too, because consumers won’t want to pay high prices for an e-reader if they’re going to have to pay a lot for the books, too. The question is who gets hurt worse. According to the Journal, both Amazon and industry executives claim that...