booksandpublishing.com

By Lee Rainie, Kathryn Zickuhr, Kristen Purcell, Mary Madden and Joanna Brenner via Pew Internet

One-fifth of American adults (21%) report that they have read an e-book in the past year, and this number increased following a gift-giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and e-book reading devices such as the original Kindles and Nooks.¹ In mid-December 2011, 17% of American adults had reported they read an e-book in the previous year; by February, 2012, the share increased to 21%.

The rise of e-books in American culture is part of a larger story about a shift from printed to digital material. Using a broader definition of e-content in a survey ending in December 2011, some 43% of Americans age 16 and older say they have either read an e-book in the past year or have read other long-form content such as magazines, journals, and news articles in digital format on an e-book reader, tablet computer, regular computer, or cell phone.

Those who have taken the plunge into reading e-books stand out in almost every way from other kinds of readers. Foremost, they are relatively avid readers of books in all formats: 88% of those who read e-books in the past 12 months also read printed books.² Compared with other book readers, they read more books. They read more frequently for a host of reasons: for pleasure, for research, for current events, and for work or school. They are also more likely than others to have bought their most recent book, rather than borrowed it, and they are more likely than others to say they prefer to purchase books in general, often starting their search online.  More…

By Alison Flood via The Guardian

Words are competing daily in an almost Darwinian struggle for survival, according to new research from scientists in which they analysed more than 10 million words used over the last 200 years.

Drawing their material from Google’s huge book-digitisation project, the international team of academics tracked the usage of every word recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the 209-year period between 1800 and 2008. The scientists, who include Boston University’s Joel Tenenbaum and IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies’ Alexander Petersen, said their study shows that “words are competing actors in a system of finite resources”, and just as financial firms battle for market share, so words compete to be used by writers or speakers, and to then grab the attention of readers or listeners.

There has been a “drastic increase in the death rate of words” in the modern print era, the academics discovered. They attributed it to the growing use of automatic spellcheckers, and stricter editing procedures, wiping out misspellings and errors. “Most changes to the vocabulary in the last 10 to 20 years are due to the extinction of misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and to the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations and genuinely new words,” the scientists write in their just-published study. “The words that are dying are those words with low relative use. We confirm by visual inspection that the lists of dying words contain mostly misspelled and nonsensical words.” More…

By Robert Moor via n+1

I recently bought a book about the future of books. It’s called The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, and features twenty-six authors (including two n+1 editors) describing what they think might become of literature. Given the collection’s prophetic subtitle, and that I was reading it on my new, still-extraterrestrial-seeming iPad, I was surprised to find that very few of the authors mention e-books. Those who do tend to regard them with dread and disgust, like a farmhand studying a handful of fallen locusts. One author compared e-books to astronaut food; another to Mortal Kombat. Another suggested that perhaps we could create e-readers that would exactly resemble books, with cardboard covers and hundreds of papery pages and so on, but whose cover graphics and print could morph from Salinger to Tolstoy in a click.

Peering through smudges of finger grease on the iPad screen, the notion of an actual electronic book held a certain whimsical allure. Then I read the collection’s penultimate contribution, by the novelist Reif Larsen. In it, he makes an obvious but often unmentioned point: the book is a technology born of its circumstances, and ancient ones at that. Around the first century B.C.E. in Rome, the codex’s bound papyrus or leather membranae replaced the polyptych’s wax or wooden tablets (imagine the world’s bulkiest three-ring binder), making it possible to compile information at greater length and less weight. Unlike wax tablets, books didn’t break or melt, and unlike scrolls, they could be quickly thumbed through to locate a desired passage.  Students could carry them to their lectures, generals could mail them to the hinterland, and pagans could hide them in their robes. It was a revolutionary invention. But now consider the e-book, displayed on a slim electronic tablet, which can relay exponentially more information at even less weight, with even greater functionality. The proponent of paper books will one day sound “like a Victorian–era man arguing the benefits of candelight over Edison’s newfangled electric lanterns,” Larsen writes. Indeed, an e-book needs multiple pages and a cardboard cover like a lightbulb needs wax.  More…

By Lambert M. Surhone via Carlos@bueno.org

It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.  More…