Mainz

Eugene G. Schwartz is editor at large for ForeWord Reviews, an industry observer and an occasional columnist for Book Business magazine. In an earlier career, he was in the printing business and held production management positions at Random House, Prentice-Hall/Goodyear and CRM Books/Psychology Today. A former PMA (IBPA) board member, he has headed his own publishing consultancy, Consortium House. He is also Co-Founder of Worthy Shorts Inc., a development stage online private press and publication service for professionals as well as an online back office publication service for publishers and associations. He is on the Publishing Business Conference and Expo Advisory Board.

Some have branded the ebook the death of the traditional book, while others say that the electronic device is a disaster for publishing.

But despite its criticism, the electronic reader does have one clear advantage - it's much easier on the eye for older people.

Older people find digital readers easier to read, as the ebook allows them to read faster and with less effort than their printed counterpart.

Yet despite their advantages, the older generation overwhelmingly prefers the printed page, researchers discovered.

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Comment

The Daily Telegraph ran an interesting story yesterday about an e-book related scientific study undertaken in 2011 by the Media Convergence Research Unit at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. The study received a fair amount of media attention when it was first reported, and if you’ve been following the digital publishing industry for awhile, it might sound familiar. The study’s purpose was [...]

The post Seniors find e-books easier to read than the printed page, study finds appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

“We are leading the pack by building a digital warehouse, which is the digital equivalent of our print warehouse,” commented Jane Friedman, president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers, in the May issue of Book Business. This is the ultimate sign-off on the industry’s embrace of the future, and its take-back of content control from trailblazers such as Google, Amazon and Yahoo. For some years now, various technology vendors have enabled publishers to deliver electronically formatted versions of their titles for special purposes. These have included applications such as conversions to XML formats (e.g., Publishing Dimensions), proprietary e-book reader formats (Mobipocket), sight-impaired applications (National

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