Tablet and E-Reader Sales Soar

There was no must-have toy of Christmas 2011 — for youngsters, anyway.

For adults, tablet computers and e-readers were the gifts of choice, judging by a new report that indicates the number of adults in the United States who own tablets and e-readers nearly doubled from mid-December to early January.

The report, which is expected to be released on Monday, confirms what book publishers say they have experienced in the last few weeks: a big jump in e-book sales after the holidays. A similar e-book boom came immediately after Christmas 2010.

The report, from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, found that the share of adults who owned tablet computers increased to 19 percent from 10 percent, with the same increase for adults who owned e-readers.  Full article

New Storage Device Is Very Small, at 12 Atoms

Researchers at I.B.M. have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible.

The findings, being reported Thursday in the journal Science, could help lead to a new class of nanomaterials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers but will consume significantly less power. And they may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing. Full article

An Invisible Keyboard Aims to Improve Touch-Screen Typing

A Jerusalem-based start-up is trying to eliminate a problem that you didn’t know existed: the visibility of a keyboard.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show, the company, Snapkeys, demonstrated its invisible keyboard, which it is hoping will become the default typing method on smartphones and tablets, replacing the traditional qwerty layout.

“We wanted to get rid of the qwerty keyboard, because all these technologies have changed, and qwerty is the only thing that hasn’t changed,” said Ryan Ghassabian, a business development manager at Snapkeys. He added that typing on a touch-screen device, especially a tablet, is too cumbersome, and an invisible keyboard would increase speed and comfort.  Full story

Is Google Making us E-tards?

Chances are you had to look something up recently, so you Googled it. As simple as that may seem, some people argue Google is changing the way we think and remember. Why does this happen? How does it impact the brain? Follow this link to the explanatory infographic.

Stanford Researcher Finds Lots of Leaky Web Sites

The Web is porous. Remarkable information trickles in from everywhere. It also sometimes spills out without its users knowing exactly where or how.

Take for instance these findings, released on Tuesday by computer scientists at Stanford University.  If you type a wrong password into the Web site of The Wall Street Journal, it turns out that your e-mail address quietly slips out to seven unrelated Web sites. Sign on to NBC and, likewise, seven other companies can capture your e-mail address. Click on an ad on HomeDepot.com and your first name and user ID are instantly revealed to 13 other companies.

These findings, released by the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, are among the leaks found on 185 top Web sites. They serve to buttress what privacy advocates have long warned of: Your online travel — your clickstream, as it’s poetically known — is not always anonymous. It can often be traced right back to rather precise parts of you, including your name and e-mail address. The study was released at an event organized by the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington. Full story

One in Three Texters Would Rather Text Than Talk

My 3-year-old told my husband the other day to send me a text message. She intuitively understood that I prefer to see his words on my screen than hear his voice. Texts are discreet. Texts are pithy.

A sampling of marital chatter: “Still at playground;” “Detergent finished;” and regrettably, “Working much longer?”

Texts avoid conflict. He could have picked up the phone and yelled: “Maybe if you weren’t working all the time you could remember to buy some laundry detergent.”

Apparently I am not alone. Nearly three out of four Americans send text messages on the phone and among those who do, 31 percent prefer texting to talking, according to a study released Monday by the Pew Research Center.  Full story

Publishing Gives Hints of Revival, Data Show

The publishing industry has expanded in the past three years as Americans increasingly turned to e-books and juvenile and adult fiction, according to a new survey of thousands of publishers, retailers and distributors that challenges the doom and gloom that tends to dominate discussions of the industry’s health.

BookStats, a comprehensive survey conducted by two major trade groups that was released early Tuesday, revealed that in 2010 publishers generated net revenue of $27.9 billion, a 5.6 percent increase over 2008. Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1 percent increase since 2008.

The Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group collaborated on the report and collected data from 1,963 publishers, including the six largest trade publishers. The survey encompassed five major categories of books: trade, K-12 school, higher education, professional and scholarly.

“We’re seeing a resurgence, and we’re seeing it across all markets — trade, academic, professional,” said Tina Jordan, the vice president of the Association of American Publishers. “In each category we’re seeing growth. The printed word is alive and well whether it takes a paper delivery or digital delivery.”  Full story.

A Call to Rethink Internet Search

“We could soon view today’s keyword searching with the same nostalgia and amusement reserved for bygone technologies such as electric typewriters and vinyl records.”

So declares Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, in an essay published Thursday in the science journal Nature. (Available online to subscribers or for a single copy purchase of $32.)

The missing ingredients, he writes, are mainly the necessary investments in money and science by leading technology companies and universities. The better world of search, according to Mr. Etzioni, will be services that field spoken or typed questions and generate useful answers. Or, as he writes, “natural-language searching and answering, rather than providing the electronic equivalent of the index at the back of a reference book.”  Full story.

At Hewlett-Packard, Flexible Displays From the Future

Hewlett-Packard researchers are hard at work on a fully flexible display screen that they say can have all sorts of consumer and retail uses. Imagine candy bar wrappers, or screens as wallpaper, all made out of a flexible material that can change images in an instant.

Compared with today’s screens, which are made with glass and can easily break, these new displays could bring down the cost of consumer electronics and make gadgets more robust and bendable. The displays could also end up replacing hundreds of products that are currently made with paper and plastics. Full story.

Cellphone Radiation May Cause Cancer, WHO Advisory Panel Says

A World Health Organization panel has concluded that cellphones are “possibly carcinogenic,’’ putting the popular devices in the same category as certain dry cleaning chemicals and pesticides, as a potential threat to human health.

The finding, from the agency’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, adds to concerns among a small but growing group of experts about the health effects of low levels of radiation emitted by cellphones. The panel, which consisted of 31 scientists from 14 countries, was led by Dr. Jonathan M. Samet, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Southern California and a member of President Obama’s National Cancer Advisory Board. Full story

Of course we’re not surprised, here’s a throwback to a post in this blog from 2008.