- Claire FallonCulture Writer, The Huffington Post
- Your tallest TBR pile nearly collapsed on your cat the other day. You're out of both bookshelf space and space for more bookshelves. Your best friend has started meaningfully reading passages from Marie Kondo's The Magical Art of Tidying Upto you. You nearly started crying when your boyfriend suggested donating your old textbooks.Sound familiar? You -- yes, you -- might just be a book hoarder.But so what? Despite the minimalist craze that seems to be sweeping the country, there can be a lot of benefits attached to hanging onto all your books. If you just can't bear to clear your domicile of all but a shelf of treasured favorites (it's like picking a shelf of favorite children!), and you're worried that you're missing out on all the psychological and interpersonal benefits of embracing minimalism, just take a few deep breaths of old book-scented air and remember these 16 reasons to be proud of your book-collecting tendencies. Read more...
SARAH KRINER/GETTY
Showing posts with label print books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label print books. Show all posts
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Amazon is opening a physical bookstore that has one key difference from traditional shops by Max Slater-Robins
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| Amazon |
Amazon on Tuesday is opening a physical store in Seattle called "Amazon Books," the first real-world bookstore for the company, which has operated online since 1994.
The store will include both books and Amazon products, such as the Kindle, Echo, and Fire TV, the company said on its website.
The company will use information it has gathered from its online store, such as customer ratings, to help select titles in its physical store.
"We're taking the data we have and we're creating physical places with it," Jennifer Cast, vice president of Amazon Books, told The Seattle Times.
Each book will also include a placard showing its Amazon.com rating and customer reviews,according to The Verge.
Here's how those reviews will be displayed alongside the physical book:
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| Amazon |
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead By ALEXANDRA ALTER SEPT. 22, 2015
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| Penguin Random House last year doubled the size of its distribution center in Crawfordsville, Ind., to speed up book distribution. A J Mast for The New York Times |
Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.
As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business.
Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were realized when Borders declared bankruptcy.
“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
How libraries can compete with Google and Amazon
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| Every kid needs a tablet nowadays. (AP Photo/Eric Gay) |
Visit the Central branch of New York City’s Queens Library at 12:55 pm on a Tuesday, and you’ll see about 100 people outside, waiting for the doors to open. At 1 pm they file in: Some settle in the comfy saucer chairs, while others rest in armchairs facing four TVs and open a newspaper. Splashes of blue and green interrupt white walls, and computer areas are separated by category: job information, adult learning center, and “young adult learning.”
But the reach of the Queens Library extends beyond the walls of its 65 physical branches. Dotting the borough are thousands of New Yorkers logged into their own mini-libraries, using the library’s mobile app to do research for homework, or the WiFi hotspots they checked out to fill in the holes in broadband access at home, or accessing e-books on one of the libraries’ tablets they can take home.
Throughout the country, library initiatives are emerging to keep up with technological advances. And libraries are finding that one population they can serve better than anyone else is low-income Americans.
Read more: http://qz.com/454586/how-libraries-can-compete-with-google-and-amazon/
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Where are the books? Libraries under fire as they shift from print to digital.
The hallmark of public libraries — the printed book, bound by covers and centuries of page-turning — is being shoved aside by digital doppelgangers.
Around the country,
libraries are slashing their print collections in favor of e-books,
prompting battles between library systems and print purists, including
not only the pre-pixel generation but digital natives who represent a
sizable portion of the 1.5 billion library visits a year and prefer
print for serious reading.
Some
of the clashes have been heated. In New York, protesters outside the
city’s main branch have shouted: “Save the stacks! Save the stacks!” In
Northern Virginia, the Fairfax County library system chief recently
mused that the Friends of the Library were no longer friends — a feud
fueled by outrage over a print collection that has shrunk by more than
300,000 books since 2009. The drop in the District is even more
dramatic: Nearly 1 million books have vanished since 2009.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/where-are-the-books-libraries-under-fire-as-they-shift-from-print-to-digital/2015/07/07/eb265752-1525-11e5-9518-f9e0a8959f32_story.html
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Why digital natives prefer reading in print. Yes, you read that right. - The Washington Post
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| Although American University student Cooper Nordquist, 21, uses his laptop most of the day, he still likes to read from the printed word for enjoyment. Despite that fact that most college students do a majority of their socializing and school work electronically, many still like to read from actual hard copy printed books. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post) |
they smell. He loves scribbling in the margins, underlining interesting
sentences, folding a page corner to mark his place.
Schembari
is not a retiree who sips tea at Politics and Prose or some other
bookstore. He is 20, a junior at American University, and paging through
a thick history of Israel between classes, he is evidence of a peculiar
irony of the Internet age: Digital natives prefer reading in print.
“I like the feeling of it,” Schembari said, reading under natural light in
a campus atrium, his smartphone next to him. “I like holding it. It’s
not going off. It’s not making sounds.”
Textbook makers,
bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still
strongly prefer print for pleasure and learning, a bias that surprises
reading experts given the same group’s proclivity to consume most other
content digitally. A University of Washington pilot study of digital
textbooks found that a quarter of students still bought print versions
of e-textbooks that they were given for free.
Read more...
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Has the e-book bubble burst? - latimes.com
Has the e-book bubble burst? - latimes.com
I like Nicholas Carr. His 2008 Atlantic cover story “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (expanded two years later into “The Shallows,” a 2010 Pulitzer finalist) helped catalyze a key idea: the distracting nature of digital culture, which encourages us to read widely but not necessarily deeply, flitting from concept to concept, piece to piece, like mosquitoes on a pond.
For Carr, this is both a social and a biological problem; among the most interesting parts of “The Shallows” are those dealing with the brain. Computers, Carr argues — or, more to the point, our use of them — are literally rewiring our brain chemistry, causing us to think differently than we did in an analog world.
Given all that, it’s perhaps not surprising that Carr should emerge last week with a Wall Street Journal piece arguing the e-book bubble may have burst. Read more...
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| The print book isn't going away. (Milvets Library) |
I like Nicholas Carr. His 2008 Atlantic cover story “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (expanded two years later into “The Shallows,” a 2010 Pulitzer finalist) helped catalyze a key idea: the distracting nature of digital culture, which encourages us to read widely but not necessarily deeply, flitting from concept to concept, piece to piece, like mosquitoes on a pond.
For Carr, this is both a social and a biological problem; among the most interesting parts of “The Shallows” are those dealing with the brain. Computers, Carr argues — or, more to the point, our use of them — are literally rewiring our brain chemistry, causing us to think differently than we did in an analog world.
Given all that, it’s perhaps not surprising that Carr should emerge last week with a Wall Street Journal piece arguing the e-book bubble may have burst. Read more...
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Why Printed Books Will Never Die
Why Printed Books Will Never Die
Measured en masse, the stack of "books I want to read" that sits precariously on the edge of a built-in bookshelf in my dining room just about eclipses 5,000 pages. The shelf is full to bursting with titles I hope to consume at some indeterminate point in the future.
It would be a lot easier to manage if I just downloaded all those books to an iPad or Kindle. None are hard to find editions that would be unavailable in a digital format, and a few are recent hardcover releases, heavy and unwieldy.
But there's something about print that I can't give up. There's something about holding a book in your hand and the visceral act of physically turning a page that, for me at least, can't be matched with pixels on a screen.
Yet the writing appears to be on the wall: E-books are slowly subsuming the printed format as the preferred vehicle on which people read books. E-books topped print sales for the first time in 2011, a trend that continued into 2012. Just this month, Bexar County, Texas announced plans for the nation's first electronic-only library. A recent study from Scholastic found that the percentage of children who have read an e-book has nearly doubled since 2010 to almost half of all kids aged 9 to 17, while the number who say they'll continue to read books in print instead of electronically declined from 66% to 58%.
The hits keep coming.
Measured en masse, the stack of "books I want to read" that sits precariously on the edge of a built-in bookshelf in my dining room just about eclipses 5,000 pages. The shelf is full to bursting with titles I hope to consume at some indeterminate point in the future.
It would be a lot easier to manage if I just downloaded all those books to an iPad or Kindle. None are hard to find editions that would be unavailable in a digital format, and a few are recent hardcover releases, heavy and unwieldy.
But there's something about print that I can't give up. There's something about holding a book in your hand and the visceral act of physically turning a page that, for me at least, can't be matched with pixels on a screen.
Yet the writing appears to be on the wall: E-books are slowly subsuming the printed format as the preferred vehicle on which people read books. E-books topped print sales for the first time in 2011, a trend that continued into 2012. Just this month, Bexar County, Texas announced plans for the nation's first electronic-only library. A recent study from Scholastic found that the percentage of children who have read an e-book has nearly doubled since 2010 to almost half of all kids aged 9 to 17, while the number who say they'll continue to read books in print instead of electronically declined from 66% to 58%.
The hits keep coming.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
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