Three Minute Report About Textbooks / eBooks Featured on PBS Nightly Business Report
Last night (June 3, 2010) the Nightly Business Report did a segment on the textbook business with a small portion of it devoted to eBooks. The report runs a couple of seconds past three minutes.
For example, they own the Maryland Book Exchange (College Park, MD, U of Maryland), it's also not far from ResourceShelf's HQ and the University Bookshop (Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas) where the Senior Editor of ResourceShelf (Gary P.) earned his undergrad degree. GO JAYHAWKS!!!.
Fast Facts:
+ Nebraska Book Company Owns 300 Stores Around the Country.
+ We Here Multiple Times from Nebraska Bookstore President and COO, Barry Major.
+ Industry-Wide Textbook Demand Outstrips Supply Four to One
+ NBC Stores Have Been Selling eBooks for Seven Years (Note: Not sure if that means eBooks in general or only e-textbooks)
Sound Byte Reactions to eBooks from Three U. of Nebraska-Lincoln (UN-L) Students
1) UN-L Sophomore: "I think it is more affordable. Electronic books are small but they're more breakable. Books you can throw in a backpack and not be worried about it."
2) UN-L Senior: "When I read things on computer, it tends to make my eyes more tired. So when I read things in paper form, I can read longer."
3) UN-L Senior: "Regular books you can just kind of take them out. Ebooks you might have to have Internet access. You have to sit down at your computer, whatever."
The Report Concludes with NBC President Barry Major Saying, "Textbooks are going to be around a long time. There is a big demand for them now and it's going to continue to be that way for I think for a number of years."
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
