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Harvard tired of overpaying for research, tells faculty to open up
The grand dame of Ivy League schools is taking action against one of higher learning's pet peeves: the exorbitant price of research journals. Even though the e-reader revolution may have already touched other schoolbooks, so far academic subscription prices -- with some journals as high as $40,000 -- are becoming unsustainable, according to Harvard. To that end, it's taking the lead and pushing its own faculty toward open access publishing, and encouraging them to quit boards of journals that aren't. That could in turn prod other schools to take the same steps, and allow Harvard to focus on more, ahem, interesting pursuits.
E-book sales triple year-over-year, paper books decline in every category
We're sure there are still scores of lifelong book lovers whose paper tomes we can pry from their cold, dead fingers, but the evidence strongly suggests that plenty of others are rapidly warming to their shiny new e-readers. US sales of e-books generated about $90.3 million in revenue in February -- roughly triple the sales reported in the same month last year. To boot, they were the dominant format for trade titles, a category that includes adult and children's works. Meanwhile, printed books declined 34 percent and 16 percent in those respective areas, with gentler, single-digit drops for education and religious titles. That follows strong January sales and echoes what Amazon said about e-books outselling print versions two to one. To be fair, of course, February is a time of year when people who received e-readers during the holidays load 'em up with bestsellers -- you know, to keep them entertained during spring break.
Forrester: e-book sales to hit nearly $1 billion this year, $3 billion by 2015
There's no denying that e-books are already big business, and market research firm Forrester is now offering some pretty impressive numbers that show just how big it already is, and how much bigger it will get in the next few years. The firm surveyed some 4,000 people and found that while just seven percent of those actually read e-books, they still bought enough of them to translate to $966 million in sales this year -- a number that's projected to grow to $3 billion by 2015. As for the reading habits of that seven percent, Forrester found that they "read the most books and spend the most money on books," and that they read 41 percent of their books in digital form. That doesn't necessarily mean that they use actual e-readers, though -- a full 35 percent apparently do most of their e-book reading on a laptop, followed by 32 percent on a Kindle, 15 percent on an iPhone, 12 percent on a Sony e-reader, and ten percent on a netbook. Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, Kindle users seem to be the biggest boosters of e-books -- they do 66 percent of all their reading in digital form.
