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NPR’s (@NPR) The Diane Rehm Show (@drshow) recently focused on the complexities of public libraries lending ebooks.

In the past year, libraries have seen a sharp growth in ebook borrowing. That trend is transforming the relationship between libraries and publishers. Some publishers worry lending ebooks will lead to piracy and loss of sales. Two of the big 6 publishers license their ebooks to libraries. Others are exploring pilot programs or have declined to participate. Many library patrons are frustrated with the limited availability of titles and long waiting lists. And some buy a copy of the ebook anyway.

More than three-quarters of the nation's public libraries lend books electronically, a fact that's not widely known among the reading public. Some publishers worry that ebook borrowers don't buy books. But a recent study suggests that among those who read books electronically, 41% of those who borrow them from the library purchased their most recent ebook. Guest host Frank Sesno (@franksesno) and his guests discuss the current and future role of ebooks at our nation's libraries.

The guests are:

·         Jeremy Greenfield (@JDGsaid), editorial director of F+W Media's Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld).

·         Carrie Russell, director of the Program for Public Access to Information, Office of Information Technology, the American Library Association (@ALALibrary).

·         Allan Adler vice president of legal and government affairs at the Association of American Publishers (@AmericanPublish).

·         Vailey Oehlke director of libraries at Multnomah County Library (@MultCoLib) in Portland, Ore.

Listen to the program in full.

Read the transcript.

See our previous blogposts, “Many Ebook Borrowers Buy, Too, Says New Study” and “The Digital Bookmobile.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish (and market) your brand content in pbook, ebook, and audiobook formats.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The Infographic is by Milo (@miloshopping). Enlarge it.

MediaPost’s (@MediaPost) MarketingDaily lists the top 10 designated market areas (DMA) in which adults who personally own an e-reader reside:

  1. San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA

  2. Washington, DC (Hagerstown, MD)

  3. New York, NY

  4. Boise, ID

  5. Austin, TX

  6. San Diego, CA

  7. Seattle-Tacoma, WA

  8. Denver, CO

  9. Philadelphia, PA

10. Salt Lake City, UT

Source: GfK MRI’s (@GfKMRINews) 2011 Market-by-Market study

See the Market-by-Market List of 205 DMAs (pdf).

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your brand’s content in today’s digital publishing environment.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

On the ECPA (@ecpa) website, David Kinnaman (@davidkinnaman), president of Barna Group (@barnagroup), says new research shows pastors love books. “One of the nation’s most loyal book-buying audiences, 92% of all pastors in the US say they buy at least one book every month, and they average 3.8 books per month. That’s anywhere from 12 to 46 books a year. Compare that to the total population, where only 29.3% of American adults buy more than 10 books in the course of a year.”

·         Pastors, as a group, purchase between 8 million and 13 million books every year.

·         Pastors influence others — their staffs, boards, and congregants — to buy books.

·         Many pastors say they want to support the business and ministry of Christian retailers. But this sentiment — particularly for bricks and mortar Christian retail — is changing with the generations. Younger pastors are leading the shift to online buying, with 57% of Buster pastors (ages 28-46) expressing a preference for online.

·         When a pastor selects a ministry-related book, the most important factor, by a wide margin, is the topic. 58% of pastors say topic is the most important factor, while only 15% give top priority to the author of the book. This is consistent across all generations and across all church sizes.

·         By a large margin, pastors in the US prefer to read books in hardcover (55%). Only 24% prefer paperback, and 16% prefer digital.

·         E-reading devices have tripled in their penetration among pastors in the last 2 years.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Study: Christians are Embracing Tablets & E-readers” and other posts tagged research.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you reach pastors with your book and brand message.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Research tab.

As the above image shows, mobile marketing can be a bit confusing.

Advertising Age (@adage) columnist Steve Rubel (@steverubel) points to a report about the apparent shift to apps in the mobile environment.

“Flurry (@FlurryMobile), an analytics firm, reported that US consumers spend on average 94 minutes a day in their apps vs. 72 minutes a day in mobile browsers.” There is a less time being spent with PCs and more time being spent with mobile. And when people are on their mobile devices, they are using apps more than mobile browsers.

Read this in full.

But a difference of opinion is expressed on iMedia Connection (@iMediaTweet) by Eric Anderson (@unsettler), partner and VP of marketing at White Horse (@whitehorsepdx), who offers “10 Tech Trends You Can Ignore in 2012,” of which #7 is “Having a branded app for that.”

Having long been a loudmouthed proponent of prioritizing mobile sites over branded apps, I thought I might be in for another plate of crow when Flurry Analytics released a study showing that in 2011, smartphone users’ time spent on apps exceeded their time spent on the mobile web for the first time ever.

But does this trend indicate an overall preference for apps over the mobile Web? It does not. A whopping 80% of that app time was spent on gaming and the Facebook app, and the rest of the time was, sorry to say, not spent on your app. A separate study by Deloitte found that 80% of branded apps are downloaded fewer than 1000 times, which is not a piece of ROI analysis I'd enjoy presenting to a CMO. Branded mobile apps belong to a narrow but important set of use cases, based on activities your loyal customers engage in again and again.

Read this in full.

Over on Harvard Business Review (@HarvardBiz), David Armano (@armano) writes in his article, “The Future Isn't About Mobile; It's About Mobility”:

In the early days of digital, the core behavior we needed to understand was that people wanted information at their fingertips and the convenience that came with digital transactions. In the social era it was all these things plus social connectivity. Mobility means information, convenience, and social all served up on the go, across a variety of screen sizes and devices.

Mobility is radically different from the stationary “desktop” experience. In some cases, mobility is a “lean back” experience like sitting on a commuter train watching a video. In other cases it can be "lean forward" — like shopping for a gift while you take your lunch break at the park. And in many cases, it’s “lean free” when your body is in motion, or you're standing in line scanning news headlines or photos from friends while you wait for your turn to be called.

Mobility trumps mobile... don't put mobile tactics in front of strategy.

Read this in full.

And senior writer with GigaOM (@gigaom), Mathew Ingram (@mathewi), writes in “HuffPo, The Daily, and the flawed iPad content model”:

The dream that many publishers seemed to have was that the iPad would create a market for their individual apps, and that legions of readers would happily download and pay for them, creating a brand new stream of significant revenue. With a few exceptions, however — such as The New York Times and other publications that have strong brands or are targeted at a very specific market — that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you know when it strategically makes sense to create a mobile app and to help you think with ‘mobility’ about your brand and your content.

Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard. And use our mobile website as your link resource on the go.

Google’s Nexus 7 is the latest tablet on the tech scene, along with Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Microsoft’s Surface.

See a comparison chart above and another one by The Verge (@verge).

See all tablets compared at The Verge.

A new study by Gartner (@Gartner_inc) says consumers are choosing to use tablets now for some activities they previously used to use PCs for.

According to the findings, the “main activities moving from PCs to media tablets” included checking email, a shift observable among 81% of contributors, and reading the news, on 69%.

Over 50% prefer reading newspapers, magazines, and books on screens rather than on paper.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you use current technology to publish and market your brand’s content.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

This week’s The New Yorker (@NewYorker) cover bitingly captures how obsessed Americans are with being online all the time, no matter what we’re doing and who we’re with!

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you capitalize on the digital revolution to strategically and effectively publish and market your brand’s content.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Christian Retailing (@ChristianRetail) reports on CBA-commissioned research by the Barna Group (@barnagroup) that Christians are using computer tablets and e-readers at a faster pace than most consumers.

Barna President David Kinnaman (@davidkinnaman) summarized the findings of The Rise of E-Reading: What Digital Content Means for Customer Loyalty, Products, and Retailing study in a video presentation July 15 during the opening general session of the International Christian Retail Show (@ICRShow) (#ICRS) in Orlando, Fla.

The study shows that

·         44% of pastors

·         30% of Christian store shoppers

·         25% of practicing Catholics all report they own a mobile tablet device or e-reader, compared to 18% of shoppers who don't visit Christian stores.

Also, the most popular device is the iPad — 44% of tablet-owning Christian store shoppers.

And nearly 70% of Christian store shoppers said they would definitely or probably buy an ebook or digital download from a Christian store.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Family Christian Stores Now Selling Its Own Tablet,” and our other posts about tablets.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market pbooks and ebooks.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, created specifically for publishing and marketing executives.

The promise we can all go paperless has been around for years, so why is it that despite email, smartphones, e-readers, tablets, and computers, we’re still so dependent on pen and paper?

BBC Click (@BBCClick) reporter LJ Rich explores why paper has such staying power in this hi-tech age. She says

Demand for paper is at an all-time high. Finnish paper provider Foex predicts that the global paper market could reach a new record of 400m tons in 2012.

See her video report.

Also see the BBC Click article, “Is the paperless office possible?”

Since paper is not going away, technology is being developed to enhance it. The above video is from Layar (@Layar), a company specializing in augemented reality that wants to make the print world clickable.

With Layar, publishers and advertisers can quickly and easily activate their static print pages with digital experiences...all without hiring developers or installing software.

Layar makes it possible for consumers to scan with their smartphones a printed magazine cover, articles, photos, and more, to immediately see digital content such as a video or more detailed and localized information.

Back in April, one of our blogposts explained how AbeBooks (@AbeBooks) uses videos to promote itself. One of them answers the question, “Why do old books smell?”

Similarly to how people enjoy the smell of the interior of new cars and look for ways to replicate it, now comes a perfume for people who prefer the smell of books.

As Melville House (@melvillehouse) reports the story:

Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld came up with the name Paper Passion, which launched on July 12 in Wallpaper magazine’s annual Handmade issue. It was actually at Wallpaper‘s Handmade exhibition in Milan last year that the idea for the perfume originated, when German publisher Gerhard Steidl remarked that his favorite scent was a “freshly printed book.”

Since then, Steidl has been working with perfumer Geze Schoen on perfecting the scent, using only four or five ingredients. Synthesizing paper’s unique aroma was apparently not an easy task. Schoen explained, “The smell of printed paper is dry and fatty; they are not notes you often work with.”

Read this in full.

If you’ve read this far, you obviously have a keen interest in books. So you’ll want to visit this website (@bookshelfporn) that features photo upon beautiful photo of bookshelves.

Also see our previous blogposts:

·         “Home Libraries Despite the Ebook Era”

·         “Even E-reader Owners Still Like Printed Books, Survey Finds”

·         “Photos: The 20 Coolest Bookstores in the World”

·         “EPILOGUE: the future of print.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your content as either pbooks or ebooks (or both).

And if you’re a book lover like we are, bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

According to MediaPost’s (@MediaPost) Online Media Daily, the spread of connected PCs, smartphones, and tablets has altered how people consume media and make purchases. So says a new study by mobile ad network InMobi (@inmobi) and Mobext, the mobile marketing arm of Havas Digital (@HavasDigital). Among the highlights:

·         Tablet use has risen quickly to 29.5 million US users, 11% of the total US population.

·         Over 60% of US tablet owners spend at least 30 minutes each day accessing media content on their tablets and 52% use a tablet to fill what previously would have been “dead time.”

·         After buying a tablet, 29% of tablet owners say they stopped surfing the Internet via their PC and/or laptop.

·         Nearly half of tablet owners — 48% — agree that tablets’ appealing design and accessibility make it is easier to access media content than on a PC or laptop.

·         When it comes to shopping, 22% of tablet users say they've shopped less in physical stores since purchasing a tablet and more than half (55%) make purchases on their device in an average month.

·         Tablet use peaks at home in the evening between 6 pm and midnight for most owners.

·         Regarding considered purchases, 55% of tablet owners say they first learn about the product on their tablet, 53% actively evaluate the product, and 58% follow through with purchasing those goods on their tablet.

Read this in full.

Read the press release.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Tablets Fuel New Habits.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you maximize your brand’s content for the digital landscape.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.