scholarly journals Free E-Books May Increase Print Sales: A Study With Mixed Results

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Heather R Williams

A Review of: Hilton, J. III, & Wiley, D. (2010). The short-term influence of free digital versions of books on print sales. Journal of Electronic Publishing, 13(1). Objective – To determine whether the availability of free digital versions of books impacts print sales. Design – Quantitative data comparison. Setting – University Instructional Psychology Department. Subjects – A total of 41 books, each with a free digital version and a traditional print version. Methods – This study used Nielson BookScan data to track print book sales during a 16-week period, 8 weeks before a free digital version of the book became available and 8 weeks after the availability of the free digital version. The authors tracked 41 books and organized them into four categories. The first included 7 nonfiction books, the second consisted of 5 science fiction/fantasy books, the third included 5 science fiction/fantasy books released together by Random House, and the fourth group consisted of 24 science fiction/fantasy books released by Tor Books. The books released by Tor Books, unlike the other books in the study, were available by free download only if a person registered for Tor’s newsletter and the downloads were only available for one week. When a free digital book from any of the other three groups was released, it remained available for several weeks, and more often, indefinitely. Main Results – Combined print sales of the nonfiction titles in the first group increased 5% after the release of a free digital copy. The majority of the science fiction/fantasy books in the second group also had an increase in post-free release sales, with a combined increase of 26%. The combined sales of the Random House titles increased by 9% after the release of the free digital versions. However, in stark contrast to the results of the first three groups, the fourth group of Tor books had a combined decrease in print sales of 18%. While the authors were not able to explain this difference with certainty, they point out that the Tor model for releasing the free digital books (making the free books available for only one week and requiring registration in order to download the books) was substantially different from the models used by the other publishers. Conclusion – The study suggests a positive relationship may exist between free digital books and short-term print sales. However, the availability of free digital books did not always lead to increased print sales. The authors acknowledge a number of factors not fully accounted for, including the timing of the free digital release, the promotion it received, and the differences in the size of the audiences for the various books studied. Ultimately, however, the authors believe the data indicates that when free digital books are offered for a period of time longer than a week, without requiring registration, print sales will increase.

Author(s):  
Stefan Scherbaum ◽  
Simon Frisch ◽  
Maja Dshemuchadse

Abstract. Folk wisdom tells us that additional time to make a decision helps us to refrain from the first impulse to take the bird in the hand. However, the question why the time to decide plays an important role is still unanswered. Here we distinguish two explanations, one based on a bias in value accumulation that has to be overcome with time, the other based on cognitive control processes that need time to set in. In an intertemporal decision task, we use mouse tracking to study participants’ responses to options’ values and delays which were presented sequentially. We find that the information about options’ delays does indeed lead to an immediate bias that is controlled afterwards, matching the prediction of control processes needed to counter initial impulses. Hence, by using a dynamic measure, we provide insight into the processes underlying short-term oriented choices in intertemporal decision making.


2018 ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. E. Mamonov

Our analysis documents that the existence of hidden “holes” in the capital of not yet failed banks - while creating intertemporal pressure on the actual level of capital - leads to changing of maturity of loans supplied rather than to contracting of their volume. Long-term loans decrease, whereas short-term loans rise - and, what is most remarkably, by approximately the same amounts. Standardly, the higher the maturity of loans the higher the credit risk and, thus, the more loan loss reserves (LLP) banks are forced to create, increasing the pressure on capital. Banks that already hide “holes” in the capital, but have not yet faced with license withdrawal, must possess strong incentives to shorten the maturity of supplied loans. On the one hand, it raises the turnovers of LLP and facilitates the flexibility of capital management; on the other hand, it allows increasing the speed of shifting of attracted deposits to loans to related parties in domestic or foreign jurisdictions. This enlarges the potential size of ex post revealed “hole” in the capital and, therefore, allows us to assume that not every loan might be viewed as a good for the economy: excessive short-term and insufficient long-term loans can produce the source for future losses.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dandan Irawan

Basically a natural partnership will achieve its goal if mutual requirements, mutual reinforcement, and mutual benefit can be maintained and made a strong fundamental commitment among partners. Nevertheless the development seems very slow. The cause is the presence of specific and different conditions and structure factors compared to other countries. Along with that, we still encounter various forms of gaps, such as inequality among regions, among income groups, between sectors, among economic actors, and so forth. The next problem is that in business entities including cooperatives and micro and small enterprises in running their business activities requires business partnerships with medium and large enterprises in order to improve business performance and business scale. While on the other hand our economic conditions and structures are not yet fully conducive to fostering partnerships based on purely business considerations or competitive market motivations but the business partnership of the foundation is strong enough in our country's constitution. Partnerships will work if partners are equally benefiting. Our concept of partnership is like that, although in the short term, there is a party or a party benefiting more from the other side.


Author(s):  
Elena Deener

Digital books are considered as an electronic document type: ‘digital book’ term is defined; structure of digital books is analyzed in accordance with document structure.


1974 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustav Wägar

ABSTRACT Whether the short-term regulation of thyroidal protein synthesis by TSH occurs at the transcriptional or the translational level was tested by measuring the effect of actinomycin D (act D) on the TSH-induced stimulation of L-14C-leucine incorporation into the thyroidal proteins of rats. TSH was injected 6 h before the rats were killed. The thyroid glands were then removed and incubated in vitro in the presence of L-14C-leucine for 2 h. The pronounced stimulation of leucine incorporation in the TSH-treated animals was depressed as compared with controls but still significant even when the animals had been pre-treated with 100 μg act D 24 and 7 h before sacrifice. On the other hand, act D strongly decreased incorporation of 3H-uridine into RNA. Short-term regulation of thyroidal protein synthesis by TSH appears to be partly but not wholly dependent on neosynthesis of RNA. Hence regulation may partly occur at the translation level of protein synthesis.


Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Paul Miller

Racism in any society is fuelled by a number of factors, often acting independently of each other, or, at times, in concert with each other. On the one hand, anti-racism efforts rely on the alignment of four “system conditions” to stand a chance of successfully engaging and tackling racism. On the other hand, where these “system conditions” are not present, or where they are not in sync, this leads to “system failure”—a situation where racism is writ large in society and in the institutions therein, and where anti-racism efforts are severely hampered. Drawing on evidence from within the education sector and elsewhere in UK society, this paper examines how a lack of alignment between “system conditions” hampers antiracism efforts, and simultaneously reinforces racism in society and in institutions—leading to gridlock or “system failure” around anti-racism.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3678
Author(s):  
Dongwon Lee ◽  
Minji Choi ◽  
Joohyun Lee

In this paper, we propose a prediction algorithm, the combination of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and attention model, based on machine learning models to predict the vision coordinates when watching 360-degree videos in a Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR) system. Predicting the vision coordinates while video streaming is important when the network condition is degraded. However, the traditional prediction models such as Moving Average (MA) and Autoregression Moving Average (ARMA) are linear so they cannot consider the nonlinear relationship. Therefore, machine learning models based on deep learning are recently used for nonlinear predictions. We use the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) neural network methods, originated in Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), and predict the head position in the 360-degree videos. Therefore, we adopt the attention model to LSTM to make more accurate results. We also compare the performance of the proposed model with the other machine learning models such as Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and RNN using the root mean squared error (RMSE) of predicted and real coordinates. We demonstrate that our model can predict the vision coordinates more accurately than the other models in various videos.


2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 722-756
Author(s):  
Jon Adams ◽  
Edmund Ramsden

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called “The Machine Stops.” Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of “the Machine,” a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: “The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. […] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky” (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has—in the vocabulary of present-day engineers—“failed badly.”


1982 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 1199-1209 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. A. POUTEAUX ◽  
G. I. CHRISTISON ◽  
C. S. RHODES

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the involvement of dietary protein and short-term chilling on the incidence of diarrhea and on transit time of digesta in pigs weaned at 3–4 wk of age. The three protein sources used were buttermilk powder (BMP), soybean meal (SBM) or pea protein concentrate (PPC), which provided 85% of the dietary protein. In exp. 1, 72 pigs were exposed to a 16 °C decrease in ambient temperature for 8 h on day 4 of a 9-day feeding trial; 72 pigs were not chilled. The pigs on the PPC diet gained less (539 g) (P < 0.05) than pigs on BMP (1183 g) or SBM (952 g) although intakes were similar. Neither diet nor chilling affected fecal moisture content or the incidence of diarrhea. The PPC ration increased (P < 0.05) transit time (slowed rate of passage) on day 8. Chilling on day 4 decreased (P < 0.05) transit time (18.7 vs. 25.6 h) on that day. Neither protein source nor chilling caused differences in total or coliform bacteria isolated from fecal samples on blood agar or MacConkey's agar. In exp. 2, eight chilled and nine control pigs were euthanized and the quantity of three markers in six segments of the gastrointestinal tract was determined. The PPC diet passed more slowly than the other diets. In chilled pigs, the chromic oxide front was closer to the anus, indicating an increased rate of passage. It was concluded that the severity of the cold exposure was not suffficient to induce diarrhea and that there was no interaction between the effects of chilling and of dietary protein. There was, however, a tendency for chilling to increase the rate of passage of digesta which could have an additive effect on the severity of nutritional diarrhea. Key words: Pigs, weaning, diarrhea, protein, cold, transit time.


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