E-readers, University Business Models, and Digital Book Reports

Welcome to this morning’s Daily Research Update. Today’s themes are e-readers, University Business Models, and Digital Book Reports. If you want more context for this research, take a look at our Education and Technology Trends for 2010. You may also be interested in our Weekly Research Index, or you can follow our live, daily research on our Current News page.

(Click here to see a simple listing of today’s suggested reading)

The Bookseller.com has a post on e-books cannibalizing print sales in the U.S.. This should come as no surprise to anyone, particularly in formula genres such as romance and science fiction.

The growth in e-book sales in genres such as romance and science-fiction is leading to a cannibalisation in sales of printed books, according to Nielsen BookScan data. Sales of printed romance books have fallen for the first time since records began at a time when e-book sales have more than doubled. The data, released as part of a seminar held yesterday with Enders Analysis, ‘Digital Seminar: e-books and their impact on the market’, showed genres such as science fiction and romance are “overperforming” thanks to the tastes of early adopters of e-books. For example, the e-book market share of the science fiction and fantasy sector globally for the 10 weeks since June was 10%, more than treble the genre’s market share of print book sales. The share taken by romance and saga books was 14%, seven times its print market share.

On the Android e-reading front, I see that Amazon has spruced up its Kindle app, although there are other solid e-readers out there for Android devices. The real excitement around e-reading on Android, however, is due to the fact that the Gutenberg e-reader for Android is now available in the Marketplace.

The new Gutenberg eReader Android app, which delivers free ebooks on demand, is now shipping through the Google Android Market. The Gutenberg eReader provides an intuitive interface to browse through the Project Gutenberg catalog and lets users read any ebook on the device. A variety of searches–author, title, subject, Google–help the users find exactly what they are looking for. The Gutenberg eReader remembers the book that the user is reading and will take the user back to the same location in the book after the reader is started. The user can browse the catalog and read the ebooks from virtually anywhere on the Android phone or tablet device. It also lets the user share eBooks with friends and family.

I also feel obliged to report that the folks at Entourage haven’t given up yet on their e-reader dreams. Their latest effort is a pocketable dual-screen e-Reader. According to The Digital Reader, “the Pocket Edge will have folding, book-like body with a six-inch black-and-white E Ink screen on one side and a seven-inch color LCD touchscreen. It will still run the Android operating system.

While I doubt the new Entourage e-reader will have much of an impact on the education market, I believe tablet devices will actually revolutionize the space. And the iPad is certainly doing its fair share to make that belief a reality.

Previously Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster had thought somewhere around 14 million iPads would be sold by Apple this year, but in a new briefing today he’s upped this forecast by about 50% to a figure of 21 million. That’a a big difference–is this an embarrassing turn-around for an analyst who should’ve known better in the first place, or a tribute to Apple’s staged plan for iPad success? It’s a bit of both. Munster’s new thinking is based on three changes in the iPad sales process: Increased supply and better distribution systems are pushing more units into the sales funnel, the device is going on sale in more markets around the world, and there’s been a surge in buying for the business PC sector. Munster doesn’t mention the self-perpetuating success-breeds-success effect, but we think that’s also playing a role here–as the iPad receives critical and popular acclaim in the countries it’s already available in, it will be pushing up demand and excitement overseas.

In Higher Education, Robert Cosgrave has this post that outlines how to put universities out of business. “If I wanted to put Universities out of business, I’d find a faster, cheaper way of filtering candidates for employment. Some way of tracking and assessing the true value of what a potential candidate has done and matching it to closely to potential employee needs. Stripped of the false simplicity of a degree, I could match personality and aptitude test results, more domain specific education at a much more granular level than a monolithic degree. Such a system would select candidates for interview who would be a much tighter fit to my needs than the gross level degree filtering. If we can unzip genomes and read from them useful information, surely we can unzip peoples life experience and map it to the right jobs and careers.” That sound an awful lot like for-profits and career colleges to me.

Finally, those of you who went through your elementary and high school education in the same era I did will remember the various innovative ways that teachers encouraged students to create book report presentations (anyone remember creating hanging mobiles?). Well, Richard Byrne is helping teachers pursue new (digital) creative alternatives to traditional book reports. In his post, Byrne gives an overview of five tools for creating video book trailers, book animations, literature maps, 3D augmented reality book reviews, and multimedia collages about books.

Suggested Reading

E-book sales begin to cannibalise print | theBookseller.com

Amazon spruces up Kindle Android app, but… | CNET News

Hands-on: Reading e-books on Android with Aldiko

Gutenberg ereader comes to Android

Startup Plans Pocketable Dual-Screen E-Reader | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

iPad to Outsell Predictions in 2010, Make iTons of Money for Apple | Fast Company