Interesting Snippets

Text digitization in the cultural heritage sector started in earnest in 1971, when the first Project Gutenberg text — the United States Declaration of Independence — was keyed into a file on a mainframe at the University of Illinois. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae began in 1972. The Oxford Text Archive was founded in 1976. The ARTFL Project was founded at the University of Chicago in 1982. The Perseus Digital Library started its development in 1985

The thing about my iPad is that there’s too much going on there. It’s not quite as busy and distraction-prone as my laptop, but when I’m staring into the growing screen of my tablet, my brain knows about all the options it has. I can check Twitter, refresh my Gmail inbox one more time, page through Flipboard… The thing I can never seem to make my way to is the Kindle app, where the books are waiting. That’s why I want a Kindle.

Coliloquy’s digital books, which are available on Kindle, Nook and Android e-readers, have a “choose-your-own-adventure”-style format, allowing readers to customize characters and plot lines. The company’s engineers aggregate and pool the data gleaned from readers’ selections and send it to the authors, who can adjust story lines in their next books to reflect popular choices…

In Tawna Fenske’s romantic caper “Getting Dumped”—which centers on a young woman who finds work at a landfill after getting laid off from her high-profile job at the county’s public relations office—readers can choose which of three suitors they want the heroine to pursue. The most recent batch of statistics showed that 53.3% chose Collin, a Hugh Grant type; 16.8% chose Pete, the handsome but unavailable co-worker; and 29.7% of readers liked Daniel, the heroine’s emotionally distant boyfriend. Ms. Fenske originally planned to get rid of Daniel by sending him to prison and writing him out of the series. Then she saw the statistics. She decided 29.7 % was too big a chunk of her audience to ignore.

In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them

The publisher paid developer The Other Media more than £50k to make the app, while also investing in a PR and marketing campaign. According to digital publisher Alex Gatrell, HarperCollins needed to sell 20k copies to recoup its investment. “Within three days we’d recouped the cost, so it was a massive success,” he said, speaking at the Publishing Apps event in London.

Called the “Kindle Mobile Learning Initiative,” the program will deliver Kindles that include english language instruction apps and other content in an effort to expose them to American culture.

“This public-private partnership with Amazon.com and the U.S. government will create a global e-reader program that introduces aspects of U.S. society and culture directly to young people, students, and international audiences