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News from JURN

Monthly Archives: September 2010

Kindle vs. iPad, the statistics from Nielsen

29 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by David Haden in Official and think-tank reports, Spotted in the news

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Lots of interesting new statistics and graphs about iPad and Kindle 3 users, over at Nielsen.

Broadly, Kindle owners are older, affluent, and educated — while iPad owners are younger, 65% are male, and they have less education and are more susceptible to advertising. Typical Apple fan-boys, by the sound of it. I wonder if very many iPad users are regularly using it as an ebook reader? Not many, I’d guess — tiring backlit screen, heavy to hold, hot, short battery life, etc. iBooks sales are dire for contemporary fiction, apparently. I’d guess the iPad is skewing to a younger demographic because it’s more useful for “rich media” consumption on the move (I’ve actually heard it called the PornPad, in jest, although only once).

I’m currently formatting my books for the Kindle 3 and the Amazon store, now that they’ve finally opened a UK version, so I’m interested in the demographics and who’s actually buying. No doubt Amazon has the statistics, but it’s not telling. There are hints that they might be looking to sell 50-60 million ebooks in 2010 as a whole. So it’s useful to hear some basic facts from Nielsen, such as…

“Forty-four percent of [Kindle users] make more than $80,000/year” […] “27% having Master’s degrees or doctorates” […] “47% of Kindle owners [are under the age of 35]”

I guess we could always crowdsource some author sales, since the indie sellers must know how much they’re selling? Joe Konrath has recently breached the wall of secrecy, for instance…

“Konrath has just passed the 100,000 eBooks sold mark, and he has shared his numbers as to on which platforms the books were sold. To put the most important number up first, Konrath sold 78,412 of the 100,000 eBooks on Kindle.”

In the next few months, if Amazon can ship enough Kindle 3s into the key UK market to meet the pre-Christmas demand (I predict the Kindle being the No.1 most-wanted adult Xmas prezzie), then according to quotes in The Bookseller we’re about to see a…

“game-changing autumn” for the UK high street, with the possibility that “this autumn is going to be carnage”.

Now high street bookshops lost me many years ago to Amazon, Amazon used, Addall used, Google Books, and audio books — they’re completely irrelevant to me — but if the predictions are correct then I won’t take pleasure in seeing a national bookshop chain shuttered by next Spring.

National markets will no doubt become more important for ebooks, since Amazon is locking UK customers out of its U.S. Kindle store, and allowing sellers to set per-territory prices. I’m used to buying used print books from the USA, often cheaper even when the cost of Air Mail is added. That’s one of the “lock-in” factors that I don’t like about the Kindle. On the other hand, the ease of publishing straight onto Amazon and the 70% royalties are amazing (even though various factors mean it’s not actually 70% in the end).

Looking out to the 18-month horizon, Quercus recently reported that their ebook sales currently bring in “less than 2% of group revenue”, but the head of Quercus is quoted as saying that…

“I would be surprised if e-books weren’t 7.5% to 10% [of their revenue] in 18 months”.

And don’t think that piracy won’t be a factor. Oxford University Press recently had a huge leak of their PDF books onto Demonoid, for instance. We may even see the Kindle DRM being cracked on a rolling basis.

Lastly, I see that Amazon has launched Kindle for the Web into beta status. Basically, embed a sample of a book into your blog, just like YouTube. Nice. And get a slice of referral commission if someone buys the full version. Not a bad idea, given that the Kindle screen is about the same as a wide blog column.

ROI Research report on search-engine user behaviour

28 Tuesday Sep 2010

Posted by David Haden in JURN's Google watch, Official and think-tank reports

≈ Leave a comment

A summary of the Summer 2010 ROI Research survey of 500 search-engine users, just released…

“19% abandon the online search, taking it offline if they can’t find the information”

The ebook bubble

24 Friday Sep 2010

Posted by David Haden in My general observations, Spotted in the news

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MIT’s Technology Review magazine (the spiritual successor to Wired) has a blog article on how “The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated”. The article usefully, if somewhat loosely, punctures some of the ebook/ereader hype. It also points to the dangers of a long term lock-in…

“publishers have largely made it impossible, or at least difficult, to loan, trade or re-sell ebooks”

As with all such broad whole-market sales statistics, I’d like to see some fine detail. What happens to the overall picture when we remove all Harry Potter and other series children’s books / cookery books / pulp romantic fiction from the 2008-2010 sales statistics, for instance?

Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers – 2010 proceedings

23 Thursday Sep 2010

Posted by David Haden in How to improve academic search

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A set of podcasts and Powerpoint slides the Sept 2010 conference of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.

Including:

* The Seven Crises of Scholarly Publishing : extinction or evolution?
* The Library : the best place for information research?
* Needles in a Virtual Haystack : discoverability as a route to market

The “bookless library”

21 Tuesday Sep 2010

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

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The first completely ebook and ejournal -only library on a U.S. college or university campus, now open at the new $82.5 million Applied Engineering and Technology Building of the University of Texas…

“No printed volumes are stored at the AET Library, and students have access to 425,000 ebooks and 18,000 electronic journal subscriptions on a variety of subjects. Those electronic collections are accessible to students from anywhere on- or off-campus, as well; those at the “bookless library” have a shortcut: they can use the resources without a password.”

Added to the JURN index today

20 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by David Haden in New titles added to JURN

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Four journals added, indexed by JURN at the article level:—

German Historical Institute: London Bulletin (1998-2010)

Asia Pacific: Perspectives (2001-2008, has some historical articles — such as “Jack London Reporting from Tokyo and Manchuria: The Forgotten Role of an Influential Observer of Early Modern Asia”)

Kemanusiaan: the Asian journal of Humanities

Coolabah (Australian Studies)

Annoyingly fuzzy

20 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by David Haden in JURN's Google watch

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It seems Google’s annoying “second-guessing” function has now been added to Google Blog Search. For instance, a search for “Lovecraft” now also picks up blogs that use the word “craft”, albeit not until the second page — presumably this is done on the assumption that the searcher doesn’t really know what they’re looking for. It’d be great if Google would allow advanced searchers to turn this dumb feature off, so we don’t have to keep on typing a + sign in front of keywords and phrases.

Update: a day later it seems to to have returned to normal.

Studying the ten blue links

18 Saturday Sep 2010

Posted by David Haden in My general observations

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Notes, Lists and Everyday Inscriptions is a Digital Commons summer school in the cultural studies tradition…

“In this cluster of The New Everyday we examine new everyday inscriptions, both the scholarly and the utterly mundane — from the grocery list to the collaboratively organized and annotated archive.”

I’ve just contributed a short ‘starter’ bibliography on the culture and history of lists.

There’s a lot of attention in the starter essays to list-making, since lists and sets of structured notes serve as a reflection and extension of personhood. Also attention to lists as constructions of ranked authenticity, part and parcel of the individual attempt to win the cultural capital that will contribute to the raising of one’s social rank. What I would also find interesting is thinking that would help deepen our cultural understanding of the automated lists that so imperfectly reflect only our chosen input terms. I’d like to pay attention to what happens so fleetingly, at the magical/mundane point of delivery for Google search results. Academics generally and somewhat lazily consider that we all have an intuitive understanding of lists and the treasure hunts they can provoke, and that the “important learning stuff” only starts to happen in our brain after at some point after we abstract selected search results into various forms of self-selected storage — bookmarks, unstructured Notepad notes, our HTML editor, our “send link by email” widget, Zotero, etc. But in a very real sense, searching is learning. Can cultural studies contribute to a deeper understanding of the powerful but invisible genre of communication/learning that is the ubiquitous list of ten blue Web links?

Buying peers

16 Thursday Sep 2010

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

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A serious proposal to privatise the peer review process.

Three ejournals added today

15 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by David Haden in New titles added to JURN

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Ejournals with articles added to the JURN index today:

Weimarpolis (theory and practice of urbanism).

Megaron (architecture, design and construction).

Victorian Network (journal of postgraduate studies in Victorian Studies).

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