There has been and continues to be a plethora of observational studies by different researchers in the publishing industry focused on how e-books have affected hard-copy book sales. Evidence from these studies has indicated that there is a significant and monumental shift away from hard-copy books to e-books.[1]These findings precipitate fears that hard-copy books might become more expensive in the near future as they begin to be less available.  This scenario could escalate to the point where only collectors of hard-copy books are willing to pay the high price for ownership.

The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, made a statement in July 2010 that sales of digital books had significantly outstripped U.S. sales of hard-copy. He claimed that Amazon had sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hard-back books over the past three months. The pace of this change was unprecedented;  Amazon said that in the four weeks of June 2010, the rate of sales had reached 180 e-books for every 100 hard-backs sold. Bezos said sales of the Kindle and e-books had reached a "tipping point", with five authors including Steig Larsson, the writer of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and Stephenie Meyer, who penned the Twilight series, each selling more than 500,000 digital books.[2] Earlier in July 2010, Hachette said that James Patterson had sold 1.1m e-books to date.

According to a report made by Publishers Weekly, for the first quarter of 2011, e-book sales were up 159.8%; netting sales of $233.1 million. Although adult hard-cover and mass market paperback hard-copies had continued to sell, posting gains in March, all the print segments had declined for the first quarter with the nine mass market houses that report sales. Their findings revealed a 23.4% sales decline, and that children’s paper-back publishers had also declined by 24.1%.[3] E-book sales easily out-distanced mass market paperback sales in the first quarter of 2011 with mass market sales of hard-copy books falling to $123.3 million compared to e-books’ $233.1 million in sales.

According to .net sales report by the March Association of American Publishers (AAP) which collected data and statistics from 1,189 publishers, the adult e-Book sales were $282.3 million in comparison to adult hard-cover book sales which counted $229.6 million during the first quarter of 2012. During the same period in 2011, eBooks revenues were $220.4 million.[4] These reports indicate a disconcerting diminishing demand for hard-copy books.

No matter what type of business you’re in, boosting your bottom line is always in the back of your mind. In a rough economy, it can be tempting to focus too much on pulling in more money and not enough on containing it from within.

That’s right, containing it. You have the potential to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars every year right under your nose from something as simple as lack of or ineffective computer training.

How much do the employees you have working for you right now really understand about technology? How good is your IT tech department? Technology changes faster than a blink of an eye and oftentimes, businesses struggle to keep their top employees trained.

With millions of dollars being lost to Internet espionage, file corruption and other computer crimes, staying on top of changes is essential. Recently, online learning centers have been emerging as the go-to method for quick and inexpensive learning. Unfortunately, this type of computer learning isn’t always the best solution.

The interpreted programming language Python has surged in popularity in recent years. Long beloved by system administrators and others who had good use for the way it made routine tasks easy to automate, it has gained traction in other sectors as well. In particular, it has become one of the most-used tools in the discipline of numerical computing and analysis. Being put to use for such heavy lifting has endowed the language with a great selection of powerful libraries and other tools that make it even more flexible. One upshot of this development has been that sophisticated business analysts have also come to see the language as a valuable tool for those own data analysis needs.

Greatly appreciated for its simplicity and elegance of syntax, Python makes an excellent first programming language for previously non-technical people. Many business analysts, in fact, have had success growing their skill sets in this way thanks to the language's tractability. Long beloved by specialized data scientists, the iPython interactive computing environment has also attracted great attention within the business analyst’s community. Its instant feedback and visualization options have made it easy for many analysts to become skilled Python programmers while doing valuable work along the way.

Using iPython and appropriate notebooks for it, for example, business analysts can easily make interactive use of such tools as cohort analysis and pivot tables. iPython makes it easy to benefit from real-time, interactive researches which produce immediately visible results, including charts and graphs suitable for use in other contexts. Through becoming familiar with this powerful interactive application, business analysts are also exposing themselves in a natural and productive way to the Python programming language itself.

Gaining proficiency with this language opens up further possibilities. While interactive analytic techniques are of great use to many business analysts, being able to create fully functioning, independent programs is of similar value. Becoming comfortable with Python allows analysts to tackle and plumb even larger data sets than would be possible through an interactive approach, as results can be allowed to accumulate over hours and days of processing time.

This ability can sometime allow business analysts to address the so-called "Big Data" questions that can otherwise seem the sole province of specialized data scientists. More important than this higher level of independence, perhaps, is the fact that this increased facility with data analysis and handling allows analysts to communicate more effectively with such stakeholders. Through learning a programming language which allows them to begin making independent inroads into such areas, business analysts gain a better perspective on these specialized domains, and this allows them to function as even more effective intermediaries.

Related:

Who Are the Main Players in Big Data?

Today we live in the age of technology. It seems like everyone owns at least one computer, but few actually know how they work. We hear about Java tutorials and C# programming, but why are these things important?

There has been an increasing demand for those who are proficient in web development. It is a job field that has grown substantially in the past decade, and it is still continuing to flourish with no signs of stopping. Learning a web language is not only a useful skill, but a necessary one. So why, out of all of the available web languages, is Java the most valuable?

·         First off, it is a simple language that is easily learned and well known.

·         Java has been around for awhile now, and has earned its place as one of the pillars of modern day computer architecture. Information on Java is abundant, and ranges from online tutorials to books, such as "Java for Dummies."