Ask someone to close their eyes and place a ring in their hand, and they’ll move the object in their hand to get a sense of its shape. Forbid them from moving their hand, and they’ll have a very difficult time figuring out the shape from touch alone.
Image: Original photograph of a pair of Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons and a copy of 50 Hikes (I can do a version with Classroom Publishing or whatever if that makes more sense).
eBooks
Don’t Give Up on Enhanced Ebooks Yet
By Kaitlin Barnes
And yet, Arnaud Nourry, CEO of Hachette Livre, put the debate about the merits of ebooks in the spotlight again. He argued that the number of sales was only going to continue to decline, because “The ebook is a stupid product. It is exactly the same as print, except it’s electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience.” According to Nourry, attempts to add other forms of content to ebooks have failed. “We, as publishers, have not done a great job going digital. We’ve tried. We’ve tried enhanced or enriched ebooks—didn’t work. We’ve tried apps, websites with our content—we have one or two successes among a hundred failures.” Though he concludes there is hope for creating new digital forms of reading, he argues that those technologies will come from industries outside of publishing and by “[going] beyond the ebook on digital.”
Instant Entertainment: Ebooks at the Library
By Bryn Kristi @bryncessk
So now you really can download the app, get a library card and borrow dozens of ebooks all without ever leaving your home.
Romance Readers’ Embrace of Ebooks
By Elise Hitchings
Out of Amazon’s ebook paid sales, 45 percent were romance. And out of all romance sales, an estimated 89 percent are digital copies. So why do romance readers buy so many ebooks?
Refreshing Old Ebooks with Your Style
By Marina Garcia
So you’re excited to open up your new book, freshly downloaded to an ereader. It might be the Amazon Kindle, maybe the Barnes & Noble Nook, or even a tablet using a book app. The anticipation rises, the new download opens to the title display, then after turning a few pages it opens to the first chapter. Three words in you realize you don’t like the font. Or maybe not. It’s more likely the font style and size are the furthest thing from your mind. As you read, a few hundred other people are likely reading that same novel, but are experiencing it in entirely different ways. Aside from the personal taste and perspective every reader brings to a story, there’s also the technical components of reading devices that allow people to customize their experience, and manufacturers to reach a wider audience with ebooks.
Aiming for Accessibility
By Stephanie Argy
Ten percent of people in the developed world and fifteen percent in the developing world have some degree of impairment that can seriously affect their ability to read, such as blindness, low vision, dyslexia, or motor disabilities.