The numbers of e-books sold every year continues to rise, and publishers are making more money from them, too. Data from the annual BookStats study released by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group on Wednesday May 15 showed 457 million e-books were sold last year, accounting for 20 percent of all book sales reported by publishers. That’s up from 15 percent last year. Sales of fiction e-books rose by 42 percent in 2012, while the growth in sales of nonfiction e-books was just 22 percent. Perhaps most telling, however, was the fact the "e-book sales in the children’s...

By Stephen Silver Ever reach into your pocket at the end of a long flight to turn on your phone, only to realize it was on all along? You’re not alone. A study released Thursday found that 30 percent of U.S. airplane passengers have accidentally left a personal electronic device turned on while on a plane. According to the “Portable Electronic Devices on Aircraft” study, jointly conducted by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX),  69 percent of respondents say they have used an electronic device in-flight. The study comes as the federal government is considering relaxing restrictions on in-flight...

The Daily Telegraph ran an interesting story yesterday about an e-book related scientific study undertaken in 2011 by the Media Convergence Research Unit at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. The study received a fair amount of media attention when it was first reported, and if you've been following the digital publishing industry for awhile, it might sound familiar. The study's purpose was to provide "a scientific basis for dispelling the widespread misconception that reading from a screen has negative effects," as Dr. Stephan Füssel, chair of the Gutenberg-Institute of Book Studies, explained it at the time. (TeleRead covered the study in October 2011.) So, why is the study back in the...

Digital Book World reports on an interesting study of interactions between 32 parent-child pairs when reading print books with either e-books or “enhanced” books. The preliminary results (PDF) have just been released, and suggest that children are less engaged and retain fewer details about what they read when they read an enhanced book than when they read a regular e-book or print book. Among both parents and children, the level of content-related actions—discussing or pointing to something in the story—remained about the same from print to regular e-books, but dramatically dropped off from print to “enhanced” e-books. The level...

OnlineUniversities.com has a post by Justin Marquis Ph.D. looking at the alarming trend of declining reading rates over the last few decades, and bringing up the recent Pew study showing that e-reader owners read more as a possible harbinger of ways to reduce the trend. People who read more, Marquis points out, become more “interesting, engaged, and intellectual”. They have a higher degree of emotional as well as standard literacy, developing empathy through repeatedly putting themselves in the place of the characters they read about. Adolescents who don’t develop good reading habits are at a disadvantage in college where...

In 2010, I looked at a Princeton study that found using harder-to-read fonts actually improved memory retention. Recently, writer Alan Jacobs at The Atlantic has considered that same study (via the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman) in light of what it might mean for e-readers. Jacobs writes that he prefers the slow, click-intensive method of annotating common to e-ink readers rather than the “easy” method with tablets, because he is better able to remember what he annotates through e-ink readers’ more difficult process. E-books are in their infancy now: there's...

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...

Last week, Slate had a piece by Jack Shafer that I only just got around to reading about a comparison between the print and on-line versions of the New York Times. Based on his own experiences, and on a paper recently presented at a journalism education association meeting, the article posits that newspaper readers read more news and retain it better when they read from print than when they read from on-line sources. The researchers found that the print folks "remember significantly more news stories than online news readers"; that print readers "remembered significantly more topics...

TorrentFreak and Techdirt have some discussion over a new study out of Denmark (PDF, in Danish) purporting to show that about 70% of people find unauthorized downloading to be socially acceptable to a greater or lesser extent. (Though three quarters of respondents said it was not all right to sell what you downloaded to friends afterward.) Just over 30% of people rated it at a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 of acceptability. (15-20% believe it is totally acceptable.) The fact that 3 out of 10 respondents found downloading to be completely unacceptable has not changed...

NPR’s On the Media has an interesting six-minute segment on a study that Professors Katherine Milkman and Jonah Berger did to determine what kinds of New York Times news stories were most likely to be emailed to friends using the site’s sharing tools. The study turned up a few interesting findings. The study determined that the stories that will be shared the most are the ones that most inspired awe in the reader. Milkman compares this to the reasons that religion spread throughout the world—when we have what we consider to be an amazing experience, we want to share...

ReadWriteWeb reports on a study from mobile VOIP company Rebtel which polled immigrants on their tablet-buying habits. It finds that an average of 13% of immigrants own tablet-style devices, compared with a Pew study showing 4% of Americans own tablets and 5% own e-readers overall. While their terminology is a little sloppy (they seem to consider the Kindle a “tablet” for purposes of the study), and the charts are a little tricky to interpret, the results are certainly interesting. Why would immigrants adopt mobile technology at a higher rate than native residents? I wonder if it holds true...

Publishing Perspectives reports on a new study (PDF file) commissioned from Bain & Co. by the Forum d’Avignon that suggests 15 to 20% of the developed world’s population could be using digital reading devices by 2015, and that digital formats may account for “20 to 28% of industry profits in the medium to long term.” The survey sample consisted of 3,000 people from several countries. There are a number of interesting findings here, but I was drawn in particular to this paragraph from the Publishing Perspectives article: The biggest obstacle to adopting a digital device,...