Josh Sternberg of digitday.com reminds us that NewsCorp’s news app, The Daily, celebrates its first birthday this week, and after one year it’s not just viable but a growing commercial success in an Internet environment hostile to the publication’s business model: subscription.  Yet it has a quarter of a million monthly readers and 100,000 paid subscribers.

Though (full disclosure) my son is a reporter for The Daily, my enthusiasm for the app is completely independent.  I just happen to think it’s terrific. But don’t take my word for it – it’s the iPad’s third most popular app.

Though The Daily started out as a dedicated iPad application, it is now accessible on Android, but the eye-popping graphics play best on the iPad’s big bright touchcreen. Some fairly heavy-hitting advertisers like Verizon, IBM and BMW display their wares there.

“I think it is the future of print,” digitday quotes a media executive, an odd description since there isn’t a single drop of printer’s ink associated with the publication.  But that’s just the point: it delivers all the news, culture and entertainment of a printed newspaper or magazine, but the videos, popups, callouts and other dazzling graphics are exactly what the iPad was created for. If you don’t have one, borrow it, download a two-week free subscription and see for yourself.

By the way, I have dubbed The Daily a “zapp” – drawn from “news app” the way “blog” is derived from “web log”. I believe this term may be original with me and if it achieves wide circulation and enters the English language (Oxford English Dictionary are you listening?) I hope Rupert Murdoch will reward me liberally, or at least recognize me with an asterisked footnote in one of his, um, papers.

The Daily After One Year: Some Lessons Learned

Richard Curtis

The latest statistics tell us more kids are reading e-books.  But the progress bar has not advanced nearly as far as prognosticators expected or manufacturers hoped.  A Bowker executive, addressing a recent Digital Book World conference, reported on findings culled from a survey of about 1,000 teens and some 2,000 parents and caregivers of young children.  Among older kids, 19% have tried e-books but only 6% read them witn any regularity. As for younger ones, only 25% of parents even own an e-book reader.  Among children 7 to 12 only 13% read on e-readers and 11% on tablets.

Is that a bad thing?  Not necessarily.  Though more and more adults are adopting digital reading habits, they are encouraging their kids to read print books and in fact promoting something akin to Luddism, such as sending them to schools where no digital devices are to be found (see High-Tech Kids in No-Tech Schools).  At bedtime they will put their Nook or Kindle down and go into their child’s bedroom to read a print-book bedtime story. So  when it comes to e-books it’s a matter of Do as I say, not as I do. And though picture book apps, including stories that “tell” themselves without parents present, are great fun, they just don’t seem to have the same appeal as the warm body and familiar voice of mommy or daddy.

Schools and libraries do not seem to be tripping over themselves to promote e-reading either. One good reason is that the children’s print business is one of the few sectors of the publishing industry that are thriving, so there is a strong financial incentive for publishers to maintain the p-book status quo.

But children form their own opinions about e-books and many reject them for very practical reasons. Because mobile phones are the device of choice for teens, the small screen size and short battery life are deterrents to e-reading.  The price of e-readers is prohibitive for many kids, who get along fine with borrowing books from the library or from each other.  And speaking of borrowing, DRM restrictions on sharing e-books is another dampening factor for teens, just as it is for adults.

For years we have expressed skepticism that, due to their high distraction quotient, screens are the best medium for young readers (see The Medium is the Screen, the Message is Distraction), and (with the exception of autistic children), there has been little recent evidence to the contrary.   In a recent New York Times article, K, J. Dell’Antonia reported an observation by Lisa Guernsey of the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative that “when we read with a child on an e-reader, we may actually impede our child’s ability to learn.”

“Children sitting with a parent while an e-reader reads to them, Dell’Antonia writes, “understand significantly less of what’s read than those hearing a parent read. Researchers at Temple University, where the study was done, noted that parents reading books aloud regularly asked children questions about the book: ‘What do you think will happen next?’ Parents sitting with the child while a device read to them (like a LeapPad or some iPad apps) didn’t ask these questions, or relate images or incidents in the book to the child’s real life. Instead, their conversation was focused on how to use the device: ‘Careful! Push here. Hold it this way.’” (Details in Why Books Are Better than e-Books for Children)

Does that mean that the next generation will reject e-books?  Not likely.  But as research develops about the reading habits and learning and retention of children using e-books, we may see a greater balance between electronic and printed books than the e-fatuation that has us in its grips today. If we don’t – well, see Digital Distractions Producing a Nation of Morons?

Richard Curtis

In a much-anticipated press event, Apple today introduced a textbook app it calls iBooks2. The company described it as an educational tool and, given how quickly and completely kids take to the iPad, it may well crack open the e-textbook market in a way that all prior efforts failed to. (See Surprise: Students Prefer Print Textbooks.)

One significant feature of iBooks2 is that it enables students to create their own books, enhance them with pictures, music, movies, videos, and texts from other sources and publish them, thus “inspiring kids to want to discover and want to learn,” as the Apple executive put it.

All well and good.  But isn’t it likely that the pictures, music, movies, videos, and texts from other sources published in these books will belong to somebody else?

These books will be published, uploaded into the iBooks store and sold there.  Unless the authors clear the rights to that content, such sales may be infringements of someone’s copyrights and Apple will be faced with the same kind of spamming that Kindle is combating.

Apple has the obligation to review the content it posts on the iPad and make sure that it does not infringe on the copyrights of others.  Will Apple have the time and manpower to police countless books and vooks, texts and theses? Not likely.  But surely they will not risk incurring liability for selling stolen goods.

If kids want to discover and learn, then the most important educational tool Apple could offer, as an adjunct to its iBooks2, is a primer on copyright. If Apple doesn’t instruct users on that fundamental legal principle, it will need to create an app for defending itself and its authors against copyright infringement lawsuits.

Richard Curtis

We’ve spilled a lot of E Ink projecting that 2012 will be the year that Amazon starts giving away the Kindle as they realize that there’s more money to be made from the content than from the gadget it’s read on. (See Kindle Wants to Be Free) We took our eye off Kindle’s rival, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, but it looks like the younger warrior has stolen a march on Goliath. The Nook is being given away, at least in one instance. But if there’s one instance, more are probably more on the way.

“When customers subscribe to The New York Times ($19.99 per month), they get a Nook Simple Touch for free,’ writes Dara Kerr on CNET.

Can B&N, Amazon, or any other e-reader manufacturer afford to give away its hardware?  Sure.  Because as time goes by, the value of the gadget declines and the value of the content bundled on it rises.  And in the case of the free Nook Simple Touch, it’s a way of giving away an e-reader that may be a bit of a drug on the market anyway.  Sales of black and white dedicated reading devices like the Simple Touch or the original Kindle are sagging as consumers opt for the color and hyperactivity of tablets.  This was confirmed early in January when E Ink holdings reported an 84% drop in sales. E Ink is the print technology that powers black and white reading devices.

Read Barnes & Noble offers free Nook with NYT or People subscription

“Amazon, Gmail, I’ve seen all sorts of shopping, I’ve seen eBay. You name it, I’ve seen it,” says Dr. Stephen Luczycki.

What has Dr. Luczycki, a medical director in a surgical intensive care unit, seen?  He’s seen doctors, nurses and technicians in operating rooms using their smartphones and computers to text their friends, check their emails, and bid on eBay while a surgery was in progress. “This phenomenon has set off an intensifying discussion at hospitals and medical schools about a problem perhaps best described as ‘distracted doctoring’,” writes Matt Richtel in the New York Times.  “My gut feeling is lives are in danger,” says another doctor who wrote a recent article about “electronic distraction” in a medical journal.

A few days after writing about electronic distraction in the operating room, Richtel turned his attention to the growing national debate over phone addiction in automobiles, a growing cause of death, maiming and mayhem on the road. At any give moment, a study discloses,  660,000 drivers are holding phones to their ears.

These are but a few symptoms of a troubling decline in the attention span of our populace. We have become a distracted society, and what should be of deep concern to parents and educators is the effect that this collective malaise is having on our children. If adults cannot handle their media addiction, why would anyone think that children can? There is evidence that they can’t.

One significant manifestation is the glorification of computer screens as an educational tool. Gloria Mark, a University of California professor who studies human-computer interaction, notes that “people are continually distracted when working with digital information. They switch simple activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes. It’s just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly.” 

Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, points out that “No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain….My greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).

“The child’s imagination and children’s nascent sense of probity and introspection,” Professor Wolf writes, “are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.“

“Techno-addiction is creating a generation of students with hypertrophied thumbs and atrophied intellects,” we wrote not long ago (Digital Distractions Producing a Generation of Morons?). The Times‘s Richtel has been hammering on this theme for  some time (in particular read his cogent article Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction) As our homes and schools become more and more committed to the romance the computer screen we need to pay attention to the warnings Richtel has been marshaling.

Can our addiction to media be cured? In a Sunday New York Times editorial, “The Joy of of Quiet“, Pico Iyer writes, “The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.Maybe that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an ‘Internet sabbath’ every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation.”

Immersion into beauty, meaning and tranquility. It’s a start.

Richard Curtis

Out with the old...

Just when you started to figure out those migraine-inducing squares called QR Codes, they will be obsoleted by a new technology called SnapTags.

Powered by a marketing outfit called SpyderLynk, SnapTags are not only cleaner and easier to read, but they sport your logo. Here’s what their website has to say about it:

“Imagine you had something that worked like a QR Code. Only instead of using an indecipherable Rorschach blot, it used your logo. And instead of just taking people to a link, it opened up whole new lines of interactive communication. Ones that you could track and use to build relationships.

“You’d have a better way to build your mobile marketing. You’d have a SnapTag.

“Consumers with either a standard or smart camera phone get instant access offers, content, promotions and information by snapping and sending a picture of the SnapTag to a designated short code. Or by scanning the SnapTag using a SnapTag Reader App.

...In with the new

It’s more accessible, more sophisticated, and completely branded. Because it’s your logo.”

In a Publishers Weekly report, Gabe Habash describes magazine and book applications that create instant opportunities for readers to participate in contests, sample giveaways and other branding, advertising and social media opportunities. They’re both codes that deliver content to your phone when you access their technology. “We are excited about collaborating with more publishers to see how SnapTags can impact the publishing model to bring more interactivity to books,” said a SpyderLink executive.

Details in SnapTags Push Scanning Technology Forward

Richard Curtis

Coming soon to a bookshop near you: a sign that says “Cell Phones Prohibited.”

“Bookstore owners everywhere have a lurking suspicion,” writes Julie Bosman in the New York Times. “that customers who type into their smartphones while browsing in the store, and then leave, are planning to buy the books online later — probably at a steep discount from the bookstores’ archrival, Amazon.com.

“Now a survey has confirmed that the practice, known among booksellers as showrooming, is not a figment of their imaginations,” she adds, citing a survey confirming that a quarter of those who’d bought a book from an online store had scouted it while browsing in a physical shop.

As if that isn’t upsetting enough to the shops’ proprietors, Tricia Duryee, writing in AllthingsD.com, tells us that brazen showrooming is actually being incentivized: “Amazon is offering consumers up to $5 off on purchases if they compare prices using the online giant’s mobile phone application in a store.” The offer is for all kinds of products but it feels aimed particularly at bookstore owners. “While Amazon’s applications and its $5 incentive can be viewed as friendly to consumers, physical retailers will see it only one way — as an attack,” says Duryee.

Amazon’s strategy could backfire, however.  The company’s recently created publishing imprints will need the good will of bookstore owners. But when Amazon’s sales reps call for an appointment to pitch their list, they may find the owners’ phones turned off.

See Book Shopping in Stores, Then Buying Online.

Richard Curtis

The Digital Revolution has created more paradoxes than a quantum physics think tank.  Silicon Valley parents sending their kids to schools that outlaw computers  (see High-Tech Kids in No-Tech Schools).  Elderly people who read faster on screens  than they do on paper (see Old People Do It Faster).  Children who don’t learn well on screens, except for autistic ones who thrive on iPads (See this video)   Students who prefer expensive paper textbooks to cheaper e-texts (see Surprise: Students Prefer Print Textbooks).

The New York Times’s Matt Richtel and Julie Bosman have produced yet another oddity: “Parents who themselves are die-hard downloaders of books onto Kindles, iPads, laptops and phones…. .want their children to be surrounded by print books.

“Parents also say they like cuddling up with their child and a book,” the Times team writes, “and fear that a shiny gadget might get all the attention. Also, if little Joey is going to spit up, a book may be easier to clean than a tablet computer.

“’It’s intimacy, the intimacy of reading and touching the world,’” said a parent who reads books on his iphone but print books to his daughter. “’I know I’m a Luddite on this, but there’s something very personal about a book and not one of one thousand files on an iPad, something that’s connected and emotional, something I grew up with and that I want them to grow up with,’” said another.

For Their Children, Many E-Book Fans Insist on Paper

Richard Curtis

The jury is still out on the effectiveness of reading on screens, especially among children. Some studies show they are too easily distracted by screens that tempt restless minds to to navigate away from schoolwork to emails, games and websites. (See High-Tech Kids in No-Tech Schools)

But for the elderly, e-reading devices such as the Kindle and the iPad actually accelerate reading speed. “German researchers found that elderly people read three times faster when using an iPad than a real book,” writes Nadia Gilani on Daily Mail Online. “The iPad’s screen was found to help them process the information on the page, even though the tablet’s LED screen has been criticized for hurting readers’ eyes if used over a long period of time.”

Tablets like the iPad were more effective than eInk devices like Kindle, the study revealed.  But when asked, the older crowd said they preferred printed books to gadgets.

Elderly people ‘read iPads three times faster than normal books’

Richard Curtis

The following is an excerpt from a press release issued by Smashwords.
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Smashwords, the leading distributor of indie ebooks, today introduced a new service for literary agents.

The service provides literary agents simple but powerful tools to manage the publication and distribution of their clients’ indie ebooks. Service highlights include free ebook conversions, centralized metadata management, distribution to major worldwide ebook retailers, time-saving aggregated sales reporting across all retailers, and special merchandising at Smashwords.com.

“Literary agents will write the next chapter of the indie ebook revolution,” said Mark Coker, founder and CEO of Smashwords. “Agents represent the most commercially successful authors. These authors are now asking their agents to add e-publishing services to exploit the potential of their reverted-rights works and unpublished works. Although all authors have the freedom to self-publish, many would prefer to delegate the e-publishing and back office duties to their agent so the author can focus their energy on writing.”

For details, click on Smashwords’ release.