SHOCKER! Ricoh Americas Corporation – a company that specializes in production print equipment – commissioned a ‘study’ that discovered that people like print books. It would have been news, probably, if the study discovered that consumers preferred anything else.
The study was interesting in it’s scope. It says that 60% of ebooks downloaded are never read (no mention of how many dead-tree books purchased are never read), that consumers “have an emotional and visceral/sensory attachment to printed books, potentially elevating them to a luxury item,” and that “college students prefer printed textbooks to eBooks as they help students to concentrate on the subject matter at hand” because, y’know, you can’t study using a tablet that has an internet connection that could allow them instant access to more – and focused – information about what they’re studying.
ALLi Partner member Simon Avery, book designer at 
Yep. Since 2007, the self-publishing part of the ebook pie has been sizable. In just a few years, the self-published author has gone from zero to hero, owning 25% of the top 100 ebook market, as reported by Amazon. No matter how many reports traditional publishers put out – saying people are eschewing ebooks, that kids don’t like ebooks, and that ebooks are the bane and scourge of the publishing world – it appears that those bought-and-paid-for ‘statistics’ aren’t based on the cold hard numbers generated by their greatest imagined enemy: Amazon.
As a multi-year winner (including this year, he wrote, tooting his own horn), I always look forward to NaNoWriMo. And Camp NaNoWriMo. And I have fond memories of Scriptfrenzy, and hope they bring it back.
A free tool from Helicon Books, the online EPUB validation, aims to save writers time and money when publishing eBooks by offering them a full review and report of critical errors in their document ensuring a smoother process to market, including quality assurance against iBooks and Kobo specific guidelines.