Popularity Of E-books Research Articles

The Impact of Teacher-generated Quizzes of Raz-Kids in Cultivating Primary School Students’ Reading Skills

Many schools integrate technology into their curriculum to reap the benefits incessantly. Thanks to unprecedented technological breakthroughs, the popularity of e-books has increased significantly. As a result, the market for e-book apps has expanded exponentially. Although multiple studies have been conducted on the widely used reading program Raz-Kids, there has been no study regarding teacher-generated quizzes on Raz-Kids in Iraq. With this fact in mind, this study explored the effects of teacher-created quizzes on improving the reading skills of third-grade students during the fall and spring semesters of the 2023-2024 academic year. Forty-four students from a private international primary school in Iraq were selected via convenience sampling to represent one of the groups. The control group engaged with the books and answered standard quiz questions via the Raz-kids app. On the other hand, the experimental group studied the books and completed teacher-generated quizzes. The data were collected via reading examinations and surveys to be analyzed by either SPSS 29 or MAXQDA. Exams and surveys were used to compare students’ reading performance and analyse their perceptions in-depth. Quantitative data showed that students in the experimental group efficiently utilized teacher-created quizzes, resulting in exceptional performance in reading assessments. Moreover, composing balanced, coherent, engaging questions influenced students’ written and spoken English proficiency. Thus, the findings of this study may guide stakeholders seeking to include e-book applications in English classes.

Commercialization of innovations in ukrainian book publishing: current trends and prospects

The article examines the peculiarities of innovative activity and commercialization of innovations in Ukrainian book publishing. Innovations are an essential factor in the development of the industry, as they make it possible to improve the quality of book products, make them more accessible and exciting for readers, and contribute to the popularization of reading. Because a third of Ukrainians do not read at all, the need to attract an audience that is used to an "easy" perception of information through watching videos, etc., is essential to developing a healthy and educated society. The hypothesis is that innovation activity in Ukrainian book publishing is not active enough, its development is relatively slow, and the implemented innovative projects are limited in number but of high quality. It is due to the conservatism of Ukrainian publishers, who are unwilling to enforce innovations if they involve too many additional risks, as well as the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and armed aggression against Ukraine. To test the hypothesis, this study analyzed the state of innovation in Ukrainian book publishing, examined the experience of Ukrainian publishers in implementing innovative projects, and identified trends in the development of innovation in Ukrainian book publishing. The analysis showed that innovation in Ukrainian book publishing has several trends and prospects. In particular, the popularity of e-books and audiobooks is growing, digital publishing is developing, new book formats are being introduced, and new technologies are being used to promote books both in the physical and digital space. Considering the current trends and prospects of innovative activity and commercialization of innovations in the Ukrainian book market, the industry needs a more comprehensive approach and the attraction of additional resources, both from the public and private sectors. In addition, to increase the number of readers and, accordingly, the development of the industry in Ukraine through the introduction of innovative technologies, we suggest moving to increasing the number of publications in electronic and audio formats, conducting experiments with the visual design of books, using environmentally friendly raw materials in the production process, developing digital publications in the format book sites for publishing poetry or short fiction, using QR codes, augmented reality and mobile applications with more paper editions, etc.

Matlab - Based Reading System for the Blind

As a minority group, blind people have always faced many inconveniences in their life. In particular, despite the popularity of e-books, the number of physical books is still huge, which poses a serious obstacle to the reading of the blind. Therefore, assisted reading has become the focus of the current action to care for the blind. There are audio books, text-to-speech and other related technologies on the market. However, these mature technologies are not efficient in dealing with the fragmentation of physical text. This paper gives a implementation which based on MATLAB, it will converts text of a picture to speech playback. Through template matching method and text-to-speech technology, the function of picture text to speech is realized, and the gap from picture to speech is solved. By using this system, pictures and words can be converted into speech playback in real time, which provides a method for helping the blind to read. In addition, the related algorithms used in this system can be extended to intelligent vision monitoring, image retrieval, image matching and other aspects.

Deep Reasoning for Enhancing Etextbooks (DREE): Using Deep-Level Questions for Guiding Learning

The popularity of ebooks does not extend to an increasing interest in etextbooks among students. A common form of etextbooks is the digital replica of the original printed book; however, a lack of interactivity was considered as an issue of etextbook among college students. To explore the potential beneficial interactive affordances, this study proposes a web-based interactive etextbook with built-in multimedia videos and self-test quizzes. Assessments have been conducted to examine the effect of using the interactive etextbook on learning and perception of learning. The results imply that a combination of multiple interactive features in etextbooks could produce optimal perception on learning and show the potential for impacting learning.

Predicting e-book ranking based on the implicit user feedback

In this paper, we plan to predict a ranking on e-books by analyzing the implicit user behavior, and the goal of our work is to optimize the ranking results to be close to that of the ground truth ranking where e-books are ordered by their corresponding reader number. As far as we know, there exist little work on predicting the future e-book ranking. To this end, through analyzing various user behavior from a popular e-book reading mobile APP, we construct three groups of features that are related to e-book ranking, where some features are created based on the popular metrics from the e-commerce, e.g., conversion rates. Then, we firstly propose a baseline method by using the idea of learning to rank (L2R), where we train the ranking model for each e-book by taking all its past user feedback within a time interval into consideration. Then we further propose TDLR: a Time Decay based Learning to Rank method, where we separately train the ranking model on each day and combine these models by gradually decaying the importance of them over time. Through extensive experimental studies on the real-world dataset, our approach TDLR is proved to significantly improve the e-book ranking quality more than 10% when compared with the L2R method where no time decay is considered.

Strategizing the Customer Relationship in the Independent Bookstore Network: A Case of Small Small Bookshop in Taiwan

Mainly driven by globalization and digitalization, book publishing is undergoing a profound digital transformation today. The popularity of e-books, digital reading and online bookstores tremendously changes our reading and consumption habits, exerting great impacts on brick and mortar bookstores, especially the small independent bookstores. In addition to the challenges from digitalization, independent bookstores in Taiwan confront with the price competition from large chain bookstores, also suffer from the internal business pressures. While in recent years, we are pleased to hear many voices from them. Some of them change the business model, adjust the business direction, and some make joint effort to establish independent bookstore alliances. So far, there are more than one hundred independent bookstores in Taiwan, providing real experience space for interpersonal interaction, knowledge sharing and cultural exchange, breeding a unique independent bookstore culture. Today many independent bookstores attach great importance to the connection with people, community and other partners in the same or different industries. No independent bookstores should be independent, and the spirit of partnership is needed to be re-examined. This research takes one representative independent bookstore in Taiwan, the Small Small Bookshop, as a case, aiming to explore the customer relationship in the independent bookstore network. By using participatory observation and in-depth interview, the bookstore business network and its relations with customers are discussed and examined, which presents an example for the operation of independent bookstores today.

Examining the Effects of School-Provided E-Readers on Middle School Students’ Reading Ability

Nationwide, the increasing popularity of e-books is undeniable; sales of e-books increased an astounding 4,456% over a 5-year period. Researchers, Miranda, Johnson, and Rossi-Williams, determined that e-readers have a positive impact on students’ desire to read. This study attempted to determine if the use of institution issued e-readers would increase reading ability of students. The researcher used Lexile and Comprehensive Testing Program scores to determine if there was an increase in reading ability (comprehension, vocabulary, and reasoning) when students are given e-readers. Nook tablets were issued to sixth-grade students in a private school environment on a one-to-one basis. All assigned reading for the Language Arts class was accomplished using the e-readers. The scores of the treatment group were compared with scores of previous students who did not have school sponsored access to e-readers.

Verification of Recovered Digital Evidence on the Amazon Kindle

The Amazon Kindle is a popular e-book reader. This popularity will lead criminals to use the Kindle as an accessory to their crime. Very few Kindle publications in the digital forensics domain exist at the time of this writing. Various blogs on the Internet currently provide some of the foundation for Kindle forensics. For this research each fifth generation Kindle was populated with various types of files a typical user may introduce using one method, the USB interface. The Kindle was forensically imaged with AccessData’s Forensic Toolkit Imager before and after each Kindle was populated. Each file was deleted through the USB interface. Files were retrieved and recovered through the USB interface before and after file deletion. These two sets of files were compared to the original set of files. All files retrieved before deletion matched their original counterpart. Not all files recovered after deletion matched their original counterpart. These steps and procedures followed a similar adaptation of the NIST General Test Methodology for Computer Forensic Tools developed by Leshney (2008) for virtual machines.

Difficulty-Level Classification for English Writings

The popularity of e-books has grown recently. As the number of e-books continues to increase, the task of categorizing all books manually requires a significant amount of time. If English sentences can be categorized according to their level of difficulty, it becomes possible to recommend a foreign-language book compatible with the reader’s level of competency in English. This study extracted eleven types of attribute from English text data, with the aim of classifying English text according to level of difficulty by learning and categorization. Using the method of “leave-one-out cross-validation,” text was subjected to machine learning and categorization. In order to improve accuracy, furthermore, an experiment was carried out in which the size of text data was varied, and the attribute selection method was implemented. As a result, accuracy was improved to 77.04%, and F-measure to 63.96%.

Przyszłość książki drukowanej w czasach e-booka (z perspektywy bibliotekarza)

The objective of the paper is to discuss problems concerning the future of the printed book in the age of the widespread development of the Internet, and the role of the library in the digital world. Until recently, the printed book was the most accessible and basic source of information transmission. The Internet, which entered our lives at the end of the twentieth century, created a virtual world. The ever-growing range of publications on offer, the introduction of less expensive readers, and the continuing process of digitalization of library collections have contributed to the popularity of e-books. The paper presents the advantages and disadvantages of printed books and e-books. The key questions underlying the discussion are: Is the e-book going to replace the traditional book? Will this revolution also affect libraries? After music and film, the book is yet another area of the analog world that has been digitalized. The consequence is that the role of the library and the librarian is changing. Present-day libraries are in the process of immense changes, being transformed from traditional to digital libraries, while those visiting a library are more often users of specialist databases rather than readers. The emergence of e-books was a natural consequence of widespread informatization and the development of the Internet; however, the electronic form of publication and different interfaces of platforms for reading e-books did not arouse the interest of traditionalists, to whom no digital version can replace the rustle of pages being turned over and the atmosphere of reading a printed book.

Ebooks and Mobile Devices in Education

Ebooks and mobile devices have quickly grown in popularity. E-books become mainstream and percentage of study materials available as ebooks is growing very rapidly. This paper examines how ebooks and mobile devices are being adopted by students. Results of research show the current use of electronic textbooks and mobile devices in full-time and distance study. The research was conducted using a questionnaire method. This paper provides an overview of the most popular ebook technologies and the technology used at The University of Ostrava. Furthermore, the author of the paper deals with different types of authoring tools for creating ebook, their advantages and disadvantages. This paper shows possible ways of creating and distributing electronic learning support for full-time and distance study.

Information cascades in online reading: an empirical investigation of panel data

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine information cascades in the context of users’ e-book reading behavior and differentiate it from alternative factors that lead to herd behavior, such as network externalities and word-of-mouth effects. Design/methodology/approach – This paper constructed panel data using information concerning 226 e-books in 30 consecutive days from Sina.com’s reading channel (Book.Sina.com.cn) from October 2, 2013, to October 31, 2013 of the same year in China. A multinomial logit market-share model was employed. Findings – E-books’ ranking has a significant impact on their market share, as predicted by informational cascades theory. Higher ranking e-books’ clicks will see a greater increase as a result of an increase in clicks ranking. Due to the information cascades effect, review volume had no impact on the market share of popular e-books. Total votes had a powerful impact on the market share of e-books, showing that once information cascade occurred, it could be enhanced by the increase in total votes. The total clicks of e-books had a significant impact on their market share, suggesting that online reading behavior would be influenced by network externalities. Practical implications – As important information, the ranking or popularity of e-books should be carefully considered by online reading web sites, publishers, and authors. It is not enough for the authors and publishers of e-books to simply pay attention to the content. They should design their marketing strategies to allow network externalities and informational cascades to work for them, not against them. Online reading web sites should also focus on eliminating certain behavior, such as “brush clicks” and “brush votes,” in order to prevent an undesirable information cascade due to false information. Originality/value – To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study to examine information cascades in the context of users’ e-book reading behavior. Moreover, this study can help other researchers by utilizing a large sample of daily data from one of the earliest online reading platforms in China.

This Is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation by Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco (review)

Reviewed by: This Is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation by Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco Jeffrey R. di Leo Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco, This Is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation Curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac. Translated from French by Polly McLean. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012, xi + 336 pp. The past ten years have perhaps been the most transformational ones in the history of the book since the invention of the printing press. eBooks (electronic books) have eclipsed pBooks (printed books) in both sales and popularity; some libraries are now “bookless”; and bookstores are becoming just about as common today as liveries. The single major reason for these changes is the rapid assent of the eBook.1 In 1998, Umberto Eco complained in an afterword to a landmark collection of essays on the future of the book, that “[a]fter having spent no more than twelve hours at a computer console, my eyes are like two tennis balls, and I feel the need to sit comfortably down in an armchair and read a newspaper, or maybe a good poem” (Eco 300). Just fifteen years later, not only are computer consoles becoming antiques, but so too are printed newspapers—and the ones that have survived and thrive do the majority of their business online. The future of the book radically changed not with the invention of the microcomputer, but with the introduction and development of the eReader. Specifically, the history of the book changed on November 19, 2007, the day the first “Kindle Readers” were released by Amazon—and sold out in four and a half hours. For it was on this date that many of the major arguments in favor of pBooks over eBooks went out the window. For one thing, reading material on a Kindle for twelve hours did not leave your eyes like “two tennis balls.” While their screens were not as good as the next generation of eReaders such as the iPad, reading eBooks on them left your eyes in no better or worse shape than reading pBooks for twelve hours straight. Their screens were nothing like the “twitchy” little screens found on the computer consoles of the [End Page 339] 1980s and 90s, but rather very reader-friendly technologies. In fact, eReaders unlike pBooks allow everything from font size and type to screen contrast and resolution to be adjusted to best meet the individual needs of the reader. But better screens and different fonts are not the only reason for the rise in popularity of eBooks and eReaders. Portable eReaders now allow one to read wherever one wants, rather than read where one’s computer happens to be. One of the best arguments against eBooks was that you could not take them to the beach or curl up in bed with them. Not only can you do this now, but you can also annotate the books you read on your eReader, share favorite passages in them with others, and even determine the analytics of your reading habits. Nonetheless, a fancy eReader without the eBooks you want is about as useful as a radio that doesn’t get National Public Radio. While it has taken a few years, eBook availability now rivals pBook availability, particularly for new books. Furthermore, many older titles are now available through open access projects such as Google Books. Given all of these developments in the technology of books, book culture is in a period of radical change and transition. Whereas in 1998, Eco could say, “It seems to me that computers are diffusing a new form of literacy but are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual needs they are stimulating” (Eco 300), the same thing cannot be said today. So, where then does he stand on the future of the book fifteen years later? Sadly, in my estimation, at much the same place he did fifteen years ago. Originally published in 2009 in French by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle as “Ne pensez pas vous débarrasser des livres,” Jean-Claude...

Overview of the digital publishing market in Croatia

This paper gives an outline of e-book business in Croatia, another European small language market, based on surveys of seven mayor e-book distributors conducted in February 2013 and February 2014. The research included collecting web catalogues by various e-book distributors and an interview with their representatives, asking them to confirm the established number of e-books. After data collection, researchers analysed and presented the exact number of unique e-book titles, publisher’s participation, types of e-book formats and their prices. The findings show that there are 1.654 unique e-book titles by 55 publishers currently available on seven main platforms, the most popular e-book format is EPUB (55%), while the average retail price is EUR 5,86.

Pricing Models of e-Books When Competing with p-Books

With the rise in popularity of e-books, there is a growing need to reexamine the pricing strategy in the e-book supply chain. In this paper, we study two forms of pricing models widely used in the book industry: wholesale and agency pricing models. We first assume a stylized deterministic demand model in which the demand depends on the price, the degree of substitution, and the overall market potential. Subsequently, we employ the game theory to determine the price equilibriums and profit distribution under different pricing models. Finally, we explore the behavior of the publisher and the retailer under different preferences and degrees of substitution through a computational study. Our findings indicate that the e-book price will be lower under the agency pricing model than under the wholesale pricing model, which is counterintuitive. The publishers have higher incentives to adopt the agency pricing model than the wholesale pricing model. The agency pricing model benefits the whole system and can provide readers with books at lower prices. The degree of substitution between the two forms of books and the readers’ preference toward e-book will affect the books’ price and the profit distribution between the publisher and the retailers.

More than Michael Moore: Contemporary Australian Book Reading Patterns and the Wars on Iraq and Afghanistan

Set in a period of heightened public debate in the 2000s and with predictions of the demise of printed books in the background, this study examines whether Australians turned to books in relation to some of the most heated international issues of the era: those associated with the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Analysis of the data reveals that over one and a half million books worth over AUS $50 million (AUS $50,213,000) which could be read directly in relation to debates about the wars were sold in the 6 years timeframe and far more if indirect reading is included. This research is one of the first major scholarly studies internationally to identify English-language contemporary reading patterns based on Nielsen BookScan sales data and is located in an illustrative timeframe (2003–2008): after the introduction of Nielsen BookScan in Australia and before the popularity of ebooks.

On the Demands of Mobile Technology and Virtual Collection Development

New technologies pose new challenges when libraries build their virtual collections. With the growth and popularity of e-books and other portable devices, collections can no longer be evaluated purely on the basis of content. Only users can indicate how these platforms will be used as mobile tools for study or entertainment devices. A study was conducted in the Helsinki University of Technology Library now a part of Aalto University from the fall of 2009 to the summer of 2010. In collaboration with the Usability Research Group, various e-book readers were tested by both professionals and students. Feedback from the students was collected through discussion, study diaries, and questionnaires. E-book readers were also tested in the library in order to see how well these e-collections are usable on these devices. Results suggest there were incompatibilities with licensed materials. While on the other hand open access materials can be easily downloaded.

Ergonomic evaluation of three popular Chinese e-book displays for prolonged reading

This research has highlighted the importance of the prolonged reading of e-book displays, and three popular e-book displays including a personal digital assistant (PDA), an e-book reader (Reader), and a notebook computer (NB) were evaluated in ergonomic perspective. Twenty-two university students (11 males and 11 females) participated in the formal experiment. They performed three 100-min reading trials with a different display for each trial. Visual fatigue, reading performance, and subjective satisfaction were collected at the end of each trial. The results are as follows: first, visual fatigue was significantly greater when subjects read from the PDA compared with the other two displays. Second, reading speed and accuracy rate were not significantly different among the three displays. Third, female subjects tended to have better reading performance than male subjects did. Finally, the subjects preferred the NB to the other two displays, because the NB had the highest satisfaction ratings in text legibility, luminance contrast, and screen size. Furthermore, some recommendations were provided to select or design an adequate e-book display for prolonged reading. Relevance to industry With the increase in e-books publications, various e-book displays and their sales have continuously grown in recent years. For designing a good e-book display, it is necessary to understand what factors would affect user performances, visual fatigue, and satisfaction. Moreover, the significant effect of character size and screen size on visual fatigue and satisfaction may assist in improving e-book display related consumer products.