Transcript Future of the eBook

Change is Here
9-22-10
ARIELLA LEHRER, PH.D.
PRESIDENT AND CEO
LEGACY INTERACTIVE
[email protected]
Topics
eBook Trends
Hardware
Enhanced eBooks
Cognitive/Learning Issues
The Future
eBook Trends - 1
• Online media consumption – of all types – is up
• What happened to the 20 somethings?
•
Online media consumption and sales of digital goods is up
because of increasing broadband speed and increased
connectivity with new types of devices e.g., TVs, mobile
phones, game consoles.
•
Disaggregation, Disintermediation, Price erosion
•
Value of digital goods market will jump from $16.73 billion to
$36.14 billion by 2014 (Gartner).
eBook Trends - 3
 eReaders and eBooks are rapidly becoming more
popular
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11,000,000 Americans will own a digital reading device and
buy 100,000,000 ebooks by the end of 2010, compared to
3,700,000 e-readers and 30,000,000 eBooks in 2009
(Forrester Research)
eBook sales on Amazon are outpacing hardcover sales, 180 to
100
ebooks will account for 11% of textbook market by 2013 (Simba
Info) and 20% by 2015 (Xplana)
2009 digital textbooks generated $40,000,000 in sales,
expected to double in 2010 (Xplana)
eBook Trends - 2
• People who buy e-readers read more as a result
• 40% said they read more, 58% say they read the same, 2% say
they read less, (Marketing and Research Resources, Inc.)
•
Customers buy 3.3 times as many books after buying a Kindle
(Amazon)
•
86% of e-Reader owners read on their device more than once a
week; 51% read on their device daily (Marketing and Research
Resources, Inc.)
Hardware Issues
 Amazon Kindle
 Dedicated e-readers to peak in 2014
 Kindle 3 is ingeniously designed to be everything the iPad will never be: small,
light, inexpensive
 Kindle is outselling the iBooks store 60 to 1 (CrunchBase)
 Mobile
 Books are most widely available type of app on iPhone (22%), but least likely to
be purchased (3%) (Apptizr)
 Upcoming Tablet Sturm and Drang
 3M zealous iPad owners and the integrated ecosystem (iBookstore carries 46,000
titles)
 Kno
 Countless models based on Google Android
 Google Chrome OS platform
 Blackberry’s BlackPAD
 HP’s web os powered on PalmPad
 Windows
Enhanced eBooks
Need to develop innovative applications that will push education to
new levels of pedagogical discovery and engagement
 Currently available for many digital books on Kindle or Apple
platforms – highlight passages, resize text, change fonts, alter text
layout, find words or phrases, share notes and bookmarks, synch
between hardware devices, free samples, dictionary, audio text to
speech
 Consumer TV/Movie tie-ins: Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth,
includes sketches, video clips, and original music from Starz
miniseries, Vooks with video
 Children’s books: Animalia for the iPad includes hidden object
games, Random House and Smashing Ideas, Dr. Seuss and Ocean
House Media
 Textbooks: The Elements, A Visual Exploration on iPad includes 3D
graphics, moving diagrams, instructional videos, audio commentary
Cognitive/Learning Issues
 What are the cognitive differences between reading
on a traditional book, Kindle, and iPad? What is
important, the medium or the message or both?
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Why does it take longer to read an eBook? Is the reading
process more or less automatic – Two distinct pathways for
processing text: ventral (direct) versus dorsal
Is remembering harder with eBooks? What about missing
context? What about “emotional attachment” to printed page
(which also helps memorability)
Tablet distractions will make us all ADD!
The Future – 1
 More lessons to learn from other media:
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Superiority of one click purchase and integrated ecosystems – Amazon
Try before you buy/sampling – Legacy Games
Episodic content – TV shows, House M.D. game
Subscription based – Always dynamic World of Warcraft
 IoT (Internet of Things) – sensors, UPC codes, tags emitting readable
data that link objects to servers in the cloud, and vice versa
 Interactive quizzes interspersed throughout, 3D graphics, video,
audio, games and simulations
 Books that learn and revise themselves, based on dynamic data about
how students are using and learning from a book
 Purchasing chapters and topics rather than entire books
The Future – 2
 Personalized, customized, constantly updated and
mashable
 Connected texts: Cross platform social networking,
linked with existing networks like FB
 Author/professor/student notes, bookmark what is
important/what you don’t understand, realtime chat,
audio comments, location based information about
readers, pose questions others can answer, integrate
text and graphics into notes
 Crowdsourced wikis linked within a book
Final Thoughts
"We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest,
are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We
have made hardly any changes in our conception of
university organization, education ... for several
centuries.” (H.G. Wells)
"The United States used to lead the world in the
number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees.
Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.”
(NYT)