year to date sales
Screen book sales climbed to over 1% of print sales ($16m compared to $1,260m). Almost all screen books will have print delivery option. Overall sales of all delivery formats combined is up 3.6%. A relatively large portion of this %, in .1% points, must be screen books since they have grown recently from a zero-base at about 170% per year.
quick role of the artifact
This old rant, wandered on forever, ten years ago. Here is a quick revisit.
fungible
“Google is not really trying to be an e-book provider—it is a search engine and an archive.” TeleRead
The less equivalent are the print and screen renderings of a given title, the more apparent is a logic of their interdependence. Also less intractable any Google copyright violation and the more credible an authenticated research library screen delivery of books.
content, content, content
“Of course, there has always been a way to break out of the prison: If a critical mass of newspapers were to opt out of Google’s search engine simultaneously, they would suddenly gain substantial market power. Newspapers are struggling, but they remain, by far, the world’s dominant producers of hard news. That gives them, as a group, a great deal of leverage over companies like Google who depend on a steady stream of good, fresh online content. Google needs newspapers at least as much as newspapers need Google – a fact that’s been largely hidden up to now.” Nicholas Carr
Perhaps newspapers will note the exploitation of library content by Google and reposition themselves. Then libraries, saving and advancing their print collections, can reposition themselves around a HathiTrust type service with certified screen delivery from fragile originals.
“HathiTrust is a digital repository and research management tool for the United States’ great research libraries, focused on providing scholars in the digital age with the largest collection of electronic research material this side of Google Book Search, large-scale full-text searching and archiving tools to manage it, and the ability to very easily flip through and purchase full titles in both print and electronic form.”
laptops top desktops
“Google made clear at its event yesterday that the OS has been designed from the code up for low-power computers, specifically netbooks. Requiring flash memory (”No rotating hard drives allowed”) for super-fast boot-up times and utilizing exclusively cloud-based apps, Chrome OS has almost no identifiable need for any but minimum amounts of local storage—or hardware that can do much more than just turn on. Google claims it’s seen the future, and it’s on the Web.” ExtremeTech
Laptops now outsell desktops. This echoes a transition from lecturn books to personal books. It also points more clearly to the use of a personalized hand held reading device as a daily, interactive communication medium. But as the transition of social communication to machine mediation progresses, the reading of books remains self-mediating and reflexive.