Dumpling in a Hanky

This article discusses the decline in ebook sales, and explains some of the potential future challenges, once of which is that the main growth area seems to be audiobooks. Publishers are now seeing audiobooks as their best area for growth rather than ebooks. This does not make me happy! I am not an old fashioned person who expects a book to be a physical object - I have both a well-stuffed Kindle and a rapidly read-and-returned collection of charity shop purchased books at home. Physical books are merely containers for the exciting contents, and the contents work as well digitally as they do physically. What I don’t have in my home however is any audiobooks. Because I hate the damn things. I just cannot get on with them. For a while a few years ago I commuted by driving for about 30 minutes each way in often-semi-static traffic. So I thought I’d put some audiobooks on in the car so the time was a little bit more productive. Nope: it didn’t work for me. I was focused on the driv...

I was recently at a discussion forum, where a legal publisher gave the audience some updates on where they are with their legal ebook offering. The jist of the presentations and discussions was - legal ebooks are great, people love them, if you aren’t using them yet, you will be very soon. Now this isn’t a new topic to me, I’ve considered how I’d like legal ebooks to work a few times, so forgive me if you've heard this from me before. I identified some of the main problems I think legal ebooks would have to overcome before a law firm library would be happy to begin using them, and I want to see if the recent massive rise in the use of mobile computing devices such as smartphones and tablets has addressed any of the issues I first had with ebooks in a legal setting. Devices vs desktops Previously, the big push was to get legal textbooks available in an electronic form through web services such as Westlaw, and access them via desktops computers, and laptops. This is ...

I've just read this blog post about a new subscription model for content on e-readers, based on the fact that: "We have statistically calculated the average consumption for tablet users and smartphone users, which is lower than one book per month,' Now, I'm not entirely sure which tablet or smartphone users they based their prediction on, but I know that my reading levels have definitely gone up since getting an e-reader. Now, I not only am buying books frequently from charity shops, but I'm downloading free, cheap and even full-price e-books, depending on the urgency of my desire to read them (e.g.if I read the first part of a trilogy and enjoyed it, I'd be highly likely to download the second and third parts, regardless of price, if I really wanted to keep going with the flow of the books). In November, I realised I'd read (at a conservative estimate, as I don't keep much track of the physical books I read, but I do have a "Read" file ...

Staff from Edinburgh City Libraries have been in touch with me, and are investigating what's happened with my missing membership application . They may have suffered a process fail with the electronic submission procedure, but actually being pro-active and responsive to the issue is a big positive for their customer services. In Mastercard terms: Form submission not being acknowledged? Bad. No membership card appearing after a month? Annoying. Wondering what's happened to your personal details on the missing form? Worrying. Spotting the issue and contacting the user? Priceless. Plus...they're getting e-books ! I finally have a good reason to use the public library: it would give me something I want, in a convenient way! P.S. - the people commenting on that link in the Scotsman are mad .