Copy and Paste Drives Sharing

emarketing reporting:
Social sharing buttons may be sexier, but according to research from user engagement platform Tynt, copy and paste is the sharing method of choice 82% of the time.
The service, which offers a way for content publishers to track sharing behavior through embedded code that indicates referrals and includes site URLs when content is pasted elsewhere, reported that in October 2012, 2% of all page views across its network involved a copy and paste.
Just over half of the content copied was then shared. This could be in an email, an instant message or another social channel. In addition, about one-quarter of copy-and-pastes resulted in a search—that is, a word or phrase from the content being viewed was copied into a search bar to look for more information on the topic.

Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1009489&ecid=a6506033675d47f881651943c21c5ed4#Rr9G50uw6fQCbESp.99

E-mail sharing is vanishing from the online news world

paid content reporting:
Have you noticed your inbox contains fewer messages from friends who “thought you would be interested” in a random news article? A new survey shows that this type of news sharing has fallen off a cliff in recent months.
According to BuzzFeed, people e-mailing stories on its network of sites has dropped a whopping 61 percent — 13 million in January to 5 million in August. The survey counted the number of referrals sites like TMZ and the Daily Mail received from Gmail, Hotmail and other email services.
The likely explanation here, as you may have guessed, is not that people are reading or sharing less. Instead, it appears the email button is fading compared to other ways of sharing stories like Facebook or Pinterest. (And, of course, more people may be cutting and pasting the article URL instead of clicking the email button).
One result of the decreased use is that some publishers are tucking the familiar email icon into smaller corners. Another implication is that the “most e-mailed stories” box, long a fixture of the New York Times and other major news sites, may soon go the way of MySpace.
http://paidcontent.org/2012/10/04/e-mail-sharing-is-vanishing-from-the-online-news-world/?utm_source=General+Users&utm_campaign=3e9fca218b-c%3Amed+d%3A10-08&utm_medium=email

Washington Post promotes sharing in FB

NetNewsCheck reporting: The Post’s social reader launched last September at Facebook’s F8 conference as a new platform experiment with a simple enough idea: Users download the app and tap into a deep wellspring of content from The Washington Post and a broad array of other media properties include Slate, the Daily Beast and SB Nation. Each time the user reads a story, it’s published to the user’s timeline and among his or circle of friends.
“You can see what your friends are reading on it and they can see what you’re reading,” said Vijay Ravindran, senior VP and chief digital officer at The Washington Post Co. “By creating that visibility into everyone’s reading, you find lots of interesting stories because they’re themed through the lens of what your friends have read.”
A unique quality of the app is that all of its content lives within its own interface, Ravindran said. The Post has full syndication rights to all of the social reader’s content, so the app isn’t sending readers off to outside links.
Having initially launched the app solely within Facebook, the Post recently opened more pathways to find it through the iTunes store and Android market, and Ravindran said that using the reader on a mobile device also keeps all of its full content through the single Facebook interface.
Straightforward enough, right? The Post takes the current tools for social sharing — all those buttons for Facebook, Twitter or other networks or email that users normally find attached to any news story — and instead embeds a growing virtual newsstand right into Facebook itself. The user reads something, and the message automatically gets sent up to the timeline.

Friends see headlines they’re more likely to care about, users get convenience and the Post gets…?
Not money. Ravindran said that the Post has no plans to monetize the app for the moment, and nary a display ad pops up nor a revenue stream trickles through its interface.
“Right now we’re running an experiment to see if we can build a new type of engagement, a new audience to read our content, so the entire company is behind seeing this off and seeing how big it can be,” Ravindran said. “We know there will be good businesses behind it if we can build a great enough product with a large enough audience.”
But if the monetization schemes lay beyond the horizon, there is one thing that the social reader is garnering plenty of for the Post: Information. Internal metrics track every nuance of user behavior and access to users’ profiles serves up additional reams of information, kind of like the ultimate reader survey that keeps feeding more information with every click.
http://www.netnewscheck.com/article/2012/03/05/17341/washpo-app-nets-younger-demo-inside-fb

Amazon: Early Data Shows Kindle Owners’ Lending Library Increases Sales

paid content reporting:

Amazon’s early data from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which allows Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) prime members who are also Kindle owners to borrow one free e-book per month, “suggests the possibility of an increase in customer purchasing,” Kindle content VP Russ Grandinetti said at Digital Book World today.

Grandinetti said “we’re trying to be skeptical about this” but Amazon’s early data “suggests you can get people engaged in a book that they weren’t interested in otherwise.” Amazon compared two customer groups of Amazon Prime members who have owned an e-reading device for more than six months and have made at least one recent book purchase in the last 30 days. The members of one group used the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and the members of the other group did not. Grandinetti said that after after the average customer’s first borrow from the KOLL, he or she went on to purchase 30 percent more books.

“Many publishers in this room give away books for free every day in a very coarse effort to increase demand,” Grandinetti said. He argued that the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a more refined approach backed by a lot of promotion on the Amazon website. “Some customers may be willing to try authors and series they might not otherwise have discovered,” he said. He gave an example, the very popular Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Nineteen percent of customers who borrowed The Hunger Games from the KOLL later purchased one of the other books in the trilogy instead of waiting another thirty days to borrow it.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-amazon-early-data-shows-kindle-owners-lending-library-increases-sales/

@ F8: Facebook Unveils New Class Of Social Apps And Redesigned ‘Timeline’

paidcontent reporting:

Facebook unveiled a new version of its social-media platform Thursday designed to help media companies and social-application developers encourage Facebook users to share more details about their lives. The new Open Graph and several varieties of Facebook applications were joined by a redesigned version of the Facebook profile called the Timeline that CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would allow people to curate “the story of your life” on a single Facebook page.

The Timeline redesign will likely be jarring to Facebook’s famously change-averse users, but Zuckerberg and Facebook director of product management Chris Cox said that the idea was to allow people to create virtual scrapbooks of their lives through Facebook. Users will be able to sort their Timelines by certain pieces of content, such as clicking on button that will display all the photos taken of you in the last year. The new Timeline will be rolling out over the next several weeks, and it will be the home for a new set of social applications.

SEE ALSO: @ F8: Zuckerberg Wants Users' Whole Lives, But To What End?

Facebook users are familiar with social games that allow them to brag about their progress or collaborate with their Facebook friends on certain achievements, but they’ll now be able to share other types of activity like the music they’re listening to or the “lifestyle” accomplishments in their lives, such as running five miles or visiting a new restaurant. Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Nike, Foodspotting, and Spotify are among the partners who will have applications based on the new version of Facebook’s Open Graph, which allows developers to build social applications on top of Facebook’s technology.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-f8-facebook-unveils-new-class-of-social-apps-and-redesigned-timeline

Will Ebooks Destroy the Democratizing Effects of Reading?

MIT technology review reporting:
Today Amazon announced that it is finally rolling out Kindle-compatible ebooks to public libraries in the U.S., a much-needed evolution of the dominant e-reading platform. But there's a larger problem that this development fails to address, and it's an issue exacerbated by every part of Amazon's business model.
Access to knowledge has long been seen as vital to the public interest -- literally, in economic parlance, a "public good" -- which is why libraries have always been supported through taxes and philanthropy. (Carnegie's decision to fund 2,509 of them around the turn of the century being an especially notable example of this.)
I challenge anyone reading this to recall his or her earliest experiences with books -- nearly all of which, I'm willing to bet, were second-hand, passed on by family members or purchased in that condition. Now consider that the eBook completely eliminates both the secondary book market and any control that libraries -- i.e. the public -- has over the copies of a text it has purchased.
Except under limited circumstances, eBooks cannot be loaned or resold. They cannot be gifted, nor discovered on a trip through the shelves of a friend or the local library. They cannot be re-bound and, unlike all the rediscovered works that literally gave birth to the Renaissance, they will not last for centuries. Indeed, publishers are already limiting the number of times a library can loan out an eBook to 26.
If the transition to eBooks is complete -- and with libraries being among the most significant buyers of books, it now seems inevitable -- the flexibility of book ownership will be gone forever. Knowledge, in as much as books represent it, will belong to someone else.
Worse yet, there is the problem of the e-reader itself. This issue may be resolved by falling prices of e-readers, but there remains the possibility that the demands of profitability will drive makers of e-readers to simply set a floor on the price they're willing to charge for one and attempt to continually innovate toward tablet-like functionality in order to justify that price.
Unlike books, which are one of the few media that do not require a secondary external device for playback, e-books put additional barriers between readers and knowledge. Some of those barriers, as I've mentioned, consist of Digital Rights Management and other attempts to use intellectual property laws as a kind of rent-seeking, but others are more subtle...
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27185/?p1=blogs

Let Readers Share E-Books, And They’ll Really Take Off

paidcontent reporting:

Limits on sharing and borrowing are limiting widespread e-book adoption. Remove those barriers, new research says, and the e-book market will expand even faster than it already has. Here’s that and some other new statistics…

Each week, e-book journalist Charlotte Abbot (@ leads an hour-long Twitter discussion with publishing industry innovators, identified by the hashtag #followreader. Yesterday’s discussion, about e-book buyer behavior, included reps from leading book industry research organizations Book Industry Study Group and Bowker PubTrack Consumer (on Twitter here). The two companies collaborate on research about consumer attitudes toward e-book reading. Here are some of their newest findings (and their earlier findings on e-book power buyers are here):
—About 15 percent of book buyers have adopted e-books. Steve Paxhia, who wrote the report, was surprised at e-book readers’ loyalty to the format. “It turns out that when readers go digital they rarely return to print,” he said.
—E-book buyers buy more books than print book buyers. In May 2011, over 30 percent of e-book buyers said they’d increased the money they spend on books, versus 23 percent who decreased their spending. However, the increases in dollar spending are lower than the increases in units purchased—i.e., people are buying more e-books but those books may be lower-priced.
—Half of e-book buyers have been downloading free e-books. Consumers expect e-book prices to stay low or drop lower.
—Biggest inducements to buy an e-book: Free sample chapters and online reviews.
—About half of e-readers are purchased as gifts—but less than 1 percent of e-books purchased are as gifts. (Overall, 14 percent of books are purchased as gifts.)
—The study supports other research finding that women are more likely to use dedicated e-readers and men are more likely to use tablets. That reflects the genres they read, Paxhia said: E-readers are more likely to be used to read fiction (a category dominated by women) while tablets are more likely to be used to read nonfiction.
—Only 12 percent of tablet users read e-books on their tablets.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-let-readers-share-e-books-and-theyll-really-take-off

Amazon offers Textbook Rental System with Savings up to 80%

Amazon ushered in a new textbook rental system today offering students huge savings by renting books. Students can now rent textbooks between 30 and 360 days and save up to 80%.
Currently Amazon is offering around 20,000 textbooks available for rent by some of the industries leading content providers. Signed up to this new program are John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis.
In order to save the most amount of money students will be able to configure their own loan periods. This is great because of the varying semester system with many different schools. You only pay for the  textbook for the duration of time you are going to rent it. These books an be read on your Kindle, iPad,  Mac, iPhone and many other devices.
http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/amazon-offers-textbook-rental-system-with-savings-up-to-80

Like, share or recommend - emotions are important

From NiemanLab
Facebook hasn’t announced that “Share” buttons will stop working any time soon, and there’s always “Recommend” sitting there as a milquetoast alternative for the emotion-squeamish. (Although technically “Recommend” presents most the same problems as “Like” — it can still be read as a fuzzy endorsement.) But there’s a bigger issue here, as news organizations — many of them traditional bringers of bad news — have to adjust to an online ecosystem that privileges emotion, particularly positive emotion.

Emotion = distribution

I can tell you, anecdotally, that for our Twitter feed, @niemanlab, one of the best predictors of how much a tweet will get retweeted is the degree to which it expresses positive emotion. If we tweet with wonderment and excitement (“Wow, this new WordPress levitation plugin is amazing!”), it’ll get more clicks and more retweets than if we play it straight (“New WordPress plugin allows user levitation”).
...
But I believe we’ll soon be at a point where social media is a more important driver of traffic than search for many news organizations. (It certainly already is for us.) And those social media visitors are already, I’d argue, more useful than search visitors because they’re less likely to be one-time fly-by readers. As people continue to spend outrageous amounts of time on Facebook (49 billion minutes in December), as Twitter continues to grow, as new tools come along, we’ll see more and more people get comfortable with the idea that their primary filter for news will be what gets shared by their friends or networks.
And that means a phrase like social media optimization will mean more than just slapping sharing buttons on your stories and telling your reporters to check in on Twitter twice a day. It’ll also mean changing, in subtle ways, the kinds of content being produced to encourage sharing. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing — just that it’s the natural outcome of the economic incentives at play.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/02/like-share-and-recommend-how-the-warring-verbs-of-social-media-will-influence-the-news-future