Millions may have held their suspicions, but last month the Canadian e-reader company Kobo confirmed it: Most people who buy The Goldfinch don’t actually finish it. According to the company’s data, less than half of Canadian and British Kobo readers in 2014 made it to the end of Donna Tartt’s behemoth novel, one of the best-selling of the year.
How did Kobo know this? Like every e-reader and reading-app maker today, the company, a subsidiary of the Japanese e-commerce titan Rakuten, has access to a comprehensive suite of data about the reading behavior of its users. In a white paper titled “Publishing in the Era of Big Data” and released this fall, the company announced that “with the onset of digital reading … it is now possible to know how a customer engages with the book itself — what books were left unopened, which were read to the very last word and how quickly.” In other words, if you read books digitally, the people who serve you those books more than likely know just what kind of reader you are…READ MORE: Publishers Know You Didn’t Finish “The Goldfinch” — Here’s What That Means For The Future Of Books | BuzzFeed News.
…For the nearly 8 million people in the US with some degree of vision impairment, the advent of ebooks and e-readers has been both a blessing and a burden. A blessing, because a digital library—everything from academic textbooks, to venerated classics, to romance novels—is never further away than your fingertips. A burden, because the explosion of ebooks has served as a reminder of how inaccessible technology really can be…
Adobe’s Digital Editions e-book and PDF reader—an application used by thousands of libraries to give patrons access to electronic lending libraries—actively logs and reports every document readers add to their local “library” along with what users do with those files. Even worse, the logs are transmitted over the Internet in the clear, allowing anyone who can monitor network traffic such as the National Security Agency, Internet service providers and cable companies, or others sharing a public Wi-Fi network to follow along over readers’ shoulders.
Ars has independently verified the logging of e-reader activity with the use of a packet capture tool. The exposure of data was first discovered by Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader, who reported the issue to Adobe but received no reply.
HarperColllins and ebook distributor LibreDigital, have signed up to use a new technology called Guardian Watermarking for Publishing from Digimarc, a new anti-piracy technology that embeds an invisible watermark into ebooks at the time of transaction. The service is cloud-based and offers an easy-to-integrate API for most ebook formats, including EPUB, PDF and MOBI.
Sonys Digital Paper E Ink e-reader/tablet hybrid has now been made available to buy, directly through the Sony website, as well as from the licensed resellers through which the tablet started being sold in May, Good E Reader has reported.
Kobo has a new e-reader out that actually could shake up the market, since it offers waterproofing as a standard factory feature on a $179.99 e-reader, with a high-res, 265 DPI 6.8-inch e-ink display. The Kobo Aura H20 basically takes the already-impressive Aura HD, makes the design thinner and lighter, and adds IP67 environmental resistance, which is a tough package to beat.
Sometimes a device comes so close to being perfect that you’d be forgiven for not realizing that with just a single tweak, it can become, in actual fact, perfect. The Kindle Paperwhite is such a device, as an e-reader that Amazon has crafted so well that you pretty much never need look beyond for anything better. But while a regular book ends up with wrinkly pages after being caught in a surprise downpour on the beach, the Paperwhite fizzles – unless you get the Waterfi-treated Kindle Paperwhite.
The Waterfi version is shipped in the original Kindle packaging without any outward appearance of having been modified. It looks and feels like a Kindle, albeit a slightly heavier version, and interacting with its touchscreen is the same as you’d find with an unmodified version. But because of Waterfi’s special treatment process, its Kindle Paperwhite is completely waterproof – submersible to above 200 feet in either fresh or salt water, for any length of time.
The U.S. Navy General Library Program NGLP last month announced the release of its new Navy e-Reader Device NeRD, which comes preloaded with 300 titles including popular fiction, recent bestsellers, and content from the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program. The new e-ink readers were designed by preloaded digital content provider Findaway World perhaps best known in the library world for its Playaway and are the first devices to feature Findaway’s new “Lock” ereader security solution.
These preloaded devices do not have wifi connectivity or accessible data inputs or outputs, and are designed to be manipulation free. This design adheres to the Navy’s security protocols, which include restrictions on many types of personal electronic devices with rewritable media or recording capabilities on board ships. In an earlier interview during the request for information stage of the project in 2012, Nilya Carrato, program assistant for the NGLP told LJ that preloaded, manipulation-free devices would also help ensure that titles are not accidently deleted during long deployments, and that sailors would not use their personal credit cards to add content to the devices.
Startup Gives Free Stuff to Student Influencers | Mashable Sumpto, a startup that identifies top social-media influencers at colleges across the country, sends students free gifts from brands in hopes that they will tweet, post and share photos of the free swag on their social-media accounts.
Illinois Library Comes Under Fire | American Libraries Magazine
“Sometimes libraries that are doing ‘all the right things’ pay a price for their excellence through uncivil attacks and attempts to dismantle their work,” Barbara Jones, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), told American Libraries. She is referring to Orland Park (Ill.) Public Library (OPPL) in south suburban Chicago, which has endured several intellectual-freedom challenges over the past few months.
The Library Vending Machine | BookRiot
Changing demographics and difficulty securing new funds for new libraries, The Pioneer Library System in Norman, Oklahoma decided to to use technology to meet its patrons needs. So last week, it opened the first 24-hour library vending machine in the United States. Built by EnvisionWare, this fully automated machine will be able to to dispense more than 400 pieces of media (books/DVDs/audiobooks) and store more than 1000 returned items.
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