Abstract

How do new screens –like iPhone or mobile phone’s– interact with their technological ancestors, such as television, cinema or video? Recent research activities in many countries reveal that audiovisual circulation and consumption habits let us argue that new media are not substituting the older ones. In fact, audience diversification exists, industries merge and even a new relationship is established with literate culture. We still read but in many different ways, and new connections emerge among readers, spectators and internet users.

Abstract

Spanish public libraries are faced with the scarce implementation of digital loans among their readers. The offer of this service, fragmented in several platforms, and its lack of integration with other resources such as the online catalog implies a greater effort of adaptation for users and places the libraries themselves at a disadvantage. Through a system of indicators, the 3 main Spanish e-book loan platforms [OdiloTK (from Odilo), Xebook (from Xercode), and iBiblio (from Libranda)] are evaluated through their implementation in eBiblio Galicia, Galician Catalog of GaliciaLe (CGG) and eBookVigo / eBook DiCoruña, respectively. There is evidence of the differences between them and a need to provide a unique and integrated access to the functions provided by discovery tools and APIs.

Abstract

Since the beginning of the XX century, public libraries have been contested. Initially, the biggest criticism was focused on those libraries which seemed a book deposit, and how they could cooperate to the development of the industrial society and also, afterwards, the post-industrial society. With the coming of the information society, new challenges came up, like the transformation from the print to digital, the training of readers... New skills were demanded to librarians to overcome these challenges. Since their first years of existence, libraries have been understood as temples of knowledge and truth. Nowadays, political, economic and ideological interests support the post-truth crisis, over abundance of information, manipulation of the information and fake news. Within this context, identification and development of information skills has become essential. Moreover, it is a duty of public libraries to create the conditions to satisfy the new demands of the information & knowledge society. Based on comparative studies, a bibliographic review and qualitative methodologies, this article analyzes the community divide, the reading mediation, the information skills, both the return on investment (ROI) and the social return on investment (SROI), and to demonstrate how the new model of public library is able to cope with the needs of the XXI century’s citizens.

Abstract

In this work, carried out at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Management of Enterprise Media, Entertainment, and Sports (Memes), we suggest that there is hope and reason for media companies to expect a recovery from the current crisis. As journalists and researchers in communication, we are concerned about newspapers’ sustainability, and we refuse to consider a future scenario without the press. According to this objective we focus on the entertainment industry with the goal of learning from it how to survive and even grow despite freely available content on the Web. We consider the unstoppable growth in users and revenue experienced by Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, and pull from it lessons learned that might help newspapers to navigate the digital landscape. Our hypothesis is that digital newspapers can find new readers in the segment of digital consumers who already “pay” for digital content including streaming movies and television shows. Sales, subscriptions, and online rentals experienced significant growth in 2013, bringing them closer to the sales figures of hardware such as DVDs and blu-ray discs. And, although piracy is an issue in the entertainment industry, there remains room for revenue growth.

Abstract

 The entire circuit of the book, both traditional and eBook, has moved into the digital realm. Metadata, recommendation algorithms, and programs to limit and control the reading take on a new importance. Powerful digital intermediaries now control most of the author-reader process.

Abstract

Reading has a multiple condition subject to very different interpretations depending on the perspectives from which it is approached, but there is a general consensus about its virtues and benefits for the population in general and for the development of culture in particular. The technological changes that it has undergone in the last decade, which involve all the actors in its value chain, have added functionalities, features and modalities that considerably expand the range of available content and its forms of consumption. One can speak of a reading in the open both to designate these new practices and to name the interpretation that is made of them according to the available measurement tools. The problem arises when analyzing the step from the act of reading to the affirmation of "I have read". And this is particularly important in the case of books, assumed in the collective unconscious as the most refined expression of reading practice, because given their chronodegradable condition, in terms of memory, statements about what is read can refer to non-existent works, from the point of view of its weight and the intensity of the memory, as numerous experiences and investigations have shown. Despite everything, reading books constitutes a mobilization of essential skills, especially in the university environment, in which the book is suffering an unappealable displacement in favor of other shorter and cognitively accessible genres, such as scientific articles. For all these reasons, the necessary procedures must be activated in the university to recover the role of prescription and recommendation inherent in teaching practices, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in order to arouse interest and use by students. of a genre relegated to an increasingly less consistent voluntarism.