Magazines are finally helping to sell ebook devices

A New York Times article recently pointed out that Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color is enjoying healthy sales, and that quite a lot of the content being sold for it is in the form of women’s magazines.  The article continues by pointing out that, according to a recent study, women outbuy men in reading material by 3 to 1, and that publishers have been surprised and encouraged by the volume of magazine sales on the NC (as I like to call the device… sorry, but “Nook Color” just doesn’t roll off my tongue).  And the article compares the device’s popularity with the iPad, the other device through which publishers like to sell their magazines, but which is not doing as well in magazine content as the NC.

None of this is surprising to me… in fact, it often amazes me that we hadn’t seen this growth much sooner. 

Stores blocking ebooks? Try selling them instead

John Blake at the Bookseller Blog laments over ebook sales cannibalizing hardback sales, what he calls “real books,” in the stores:

The idea of simultaneously publishing an exciting new title both as a hardback and as an e-book seems totally crazy. If only publishers could publish the book as a hardback initially, then put out the e-book some months later, bookshops would be given a sporting chance to stay in business, and the dizzying decline of book sales could almost certainly be slowed.

I was fascinated to discover that serious readers—people who buy more than 12 books a year—are fast becoming the keenest e-book customers. These, surely, are the very people who would wish to purchase hardbacks rather than waiting months for an e-book edition.

What you want to get used to

I first started typing on a Royal Typewriter just like this one. Today I do a lot of typing on a cellphone...

One of the most spectacular characteristics of higher organisms is their capacity to rise above their instinctual programming and learn new things. The ability to learn, and to learn well, is often tied directly to survival success, or at least to level of prosperity. Humans have proven to be particularly adept at learning, and take full advantage of this tool in their struggle to get ahead in survival and non-survival situations.

Thanks to the wonderful plasticity of the human mind, an individual is capable of devoting varied amounts of its brain processing power on the subject of its choosing. If they choose to know just a little about a particular subject, only a small amount is retained. Yet, if they decide to know everything there is to know about a subject, the brain is capable of applying substantial information storage and processing capacity to that subject. This accounts for people who can carry encyclopedic knowledge about one subject—say, Star Wars—whilst simultaneously having incredibly minimal knowledge about another subject—say, girls. (I started off vowing not to use that particular analogy… but man, it was just too frakkin’ easy…)

Being NOML

Our planet has reached an era of crisis, a point at which civilization severely threatens the Earth’s ability to maintain a biosphere conducive to human life. The early warning signs have been about for quite some time, but only recently have the signs been fully understood and appreciated… only now do the majority of people believe that the situation has graduated from “maybe” to “absolutely.”