Amazon China issued a new report and surveyed 14,000 people to look into their reading habits. It found that almost half read at least ten books a year and a whopping 80% read more than thirty minutes per day. Chinese readers are fairly agnostic when it comes to reading digital and print. The report found that 55% … [Read more...]
38% of US Children and Teens Read on their Tablet
Tablet usage is increasing in the United States and 65% of 8 to 17 year olds are using one on a daily basis. The vast majority of this age group is not using their parents device, but have complete ownership with few restrictions. One of the most popular thing to do is reading, and ebook usage is on the rise. YouGov … [Read more...]
Kobo Wishlist for Audiobooks and eBooks Now Available for Desktop
All of the Kobo mobile apps and e-readers have a wishlist system, where users can add ebooks to a dedicated list. Sometimes they do it to organize future purchases and others express a desire to read them, but without immediate intent to purchase. The main Kobo retail website for MAC and PC have been without a wishlist … [Read more...]
Amazon is Giving Away a Bunch of Free eBooks for World Book Day
Amazon is giving away a dozen free ebooks for World Book Day. These titles are from AmazonCrosssing, which is an imprint devoted towards that are translated into English from other languages. The first translated books were the French-language novel The King of Kahel and the German-language novel The Hangman's Daughter … [Read more...]
Google Launches Talk to Books
Google has just launched a new service called Talk to Books and it leverages machine learning. If you type in a full sentence it searches all the sentences in over 100,000 books to find the ones that respond to your input based on semantic meaning. Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering and Rachel Bernstein, Product … [Read more...]
New Book by J.R.R. Tolkien is called the The Fall of Gondolin
The Fall of Gondolin is a new book by J.R.R. Tolkien and was edited and revised by his son Christopher. It was illustrated by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings artist Alan Lee and will be published by HarperCollins this August. Here is the books byline "During the years that the dark lord Morgoth (Sauron’s … [Read more...]
Good e-Reader Launches Audio Reader for Android
Good e-Reader would like to introduce our first major Android app for smartphones and tablets. It is called Audio Reader and it turns any ebook into an audiobook. It reads aloud all of your sideloaded content using Amazon Polly, which is what Alexa is built on. We support 28 different languages and 12 different voices … [Read more...]
Scribd has 750,000 paying subscribers
Scribd is one of the largest unlimited audiobook and ebook websites in the world and they currently have 750,000 paying subscribers. Scribd has seen a double-digit increase in engagement since its shift to an unlimited model in February 2018, and the company’s growth rate has averaged 50% year-over-year. Key indicators … [Read more...]
eBook Piracy is on the rise in 2018
Pirate websites received 300 billion visitors last year and ebooks represent a small, but growing segment. Digimarc and Nielsen conducted a recent study that reveals 41% of all adult e-book pirates are aged between 18 and 29 but perhaps surprisingly, 47% fall into the 30 to 44-year-old bracket. The remaining 13% are … [Read more...]
Microsoft Needs to Develop an e-Reader App
Microsoft has been operating a digital bookstore since late 2017 and they sell ebooks only in the United States and have refused to sell them in other countries. Their store is so feeble that it accounts for less than 1% of all ebook sales. This is primarily attributed to the Edge browser as being the only way you can … [Read more...]
These are the top Google Play Books and Audiobooks for March 2018
Every month Google hypes up the top five audiobooks and ebooks of the month. This gives us an indication on what people are buying on the platform. Google has a paltry 2% market share of the entire US ebook industry and around 4% of the international market. [BEST_SELLER_LISTING] … [Read more...]
The Effect of e-Books on College Students
In the age of the Internet, everything has become accessible. Any information that only two decades ago was under seven locks, today can pop up on anyone’s computer screen. Given that the Internet has presented us with an easy access to any data, books have no longer become something that is hard to find. Besides, … [Read more...]