Ebooks are not for fun
According to this report, a survey found that most people use ebooks just for completing their works, not for fun and leisure. With the emerging of new ebooks reader such as Amazon Kindle and Sony EReader, we are wondering whether ebooks will serve the reader same as paper books serve. Usually, for books, people read it for a variety of purposes. From just for fun until researches, there were a balance number of the reader. However, this is not true for ebooks. Maybe the emergence of ebooks have make the purpose of reading evolved.
A survey at five universities around the world has found considerable buy-in of eBooks for research and study purposes, giving strong credence to the notion there is a large, undertapped market for the medium.
Between 52 percent and 84 percent of respondents were aware of the availability of eBooks through their libraries, and between 58 percent and 80 percent had used eBooks at least once, according to a new study conducted by Springer Science+Business Media.
Interestingly, the study also found that people who were inclined to rely on digital ink for work didn’t much like it for play. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for example, 78 percent said they use eBooks for research, compared to only 10 percent for leisure. (see chart above)
The survey also found that most people find eBooks through Google and library search engines, rather than vendor site (just like everyone does for … everything).
As more eBook readers emerge, and evolve to tackle the new media market, one question that keeps popping up is: Who benefits the most from the relatively new format?
Rumors have been floating around about a new Amazon Kindle being targeted towards college students, who face high textbook prices and have been turning to piracy and investigating other options like open source books to save money.
Amazon hasn’t confirmed any such effort yet, but it looks like some sort of deal with university libraries would make a lot of sense, where students can borrow texts for free as needed.
Schools who participated in the study include: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, in Amsterdam; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Muenster in Germany; University of Turku in Finland; and JRD Tata Memorial Library Bangalore in India.
