Springer sees significant gain from e-book sales

[yagiz]

Springer sees significant gain from e-book sales

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/90...ook-sales.html

Electronic book readers such as Amazon's Kindle are transforming academic publishing much faster than the consumer market, notes the FT following an interview with Springer Science & Business Media, the second largest scientific, technical and medical publisher. But it wants manufacturers of e-book readers to settle on a common software standard to alleviate unnecessary costs.

[griffonwing]

JE-RRY! JE-RRY! JE-RRY! JE-RRY!

This was my first thought when looking at the title of the thread. I thought it had something to do with the controversial talkshow host touting ebooks.

Now I'm bummed.

[Teyrnon]

Interesting, that's a pretty specialized niche. I wonder what other niches are seeing a similar phenomenon.

[Abecedary]

I used to work in STM publishing, and I can certainly vouch for the fact that academics are on the leading edge of electronic document delivery (after all, that's one of the main reasons the internet was created). What I find interesting is that Springer seems to be grouping electronic delivery of articles (of which a lot are purchased) into the "e-book" category.

[yagiz]

It would also be interesting to know using what type of device these e-books are read. I would not be surprised if most of them are read on computers and not on e-readers.

[Abecedary]

Originally Posted by yagiz

It would also be interesting to know using what type of device these e-books are read. I would not be surprised if most of them are read on computers and not on e-readers.

By and large, scientific articles are either read onscreen or they're printed out and highlighted/marked up. However, this is changing somewhat with the new generation of students.

This may shock some of you, but when I worked for a journal and we were putting our archive of back issues up, a huge majority of our readers were very clear that they wanted PDF scans of the articles. This was so that they could print them out and basically have a replica of the journal article as it appeared in print. Mind you, this was a few years ago, and was primarily the view held by the older researchers. The younger ones generally just wanted access to the material and didn't care how it was presented.