Study: E-book Library Borrowing Takes Slow Pace

E-book readers have been relatively slow to borrow digital works from the library, deterred by a limited selection and by not even knowing whether their local branch offers e-releases, according to a new study.

With the rise of e-readers like Amazon's Kindle and other tablets that make it easy to carry a lot of books around, many say that e-books will eventually kill printed books altogether. 

A new Pew study shows that US book lovers are increasingly turning inkless pages.Slightly more than a fifth of US adults reported having used an "e-book" during the past year, their ranks swollen by the popularity of Kindles, Nooks, iPads and other gadgets during the year-end holiday gifting season.The percentage of adults reading digital books jumped from 17 percent in mid-December to 21 percent by February, according to Pew research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

133,000 gigabytes worth of tweets currently takes days to search, but The Library of Congress is nonetheless trying to archive American Twitter use for posterity The venerable US institution is assembling all of the 400 million tweets sent by Americans each day, in the belief that each of the mini-messages reflect a small but important part of the national narrative.

Even as e-book sales surge, Americans are slow to look to their public libraries to take advantage of the format, a study showed Friday.The Pew Internet & American Life Project found just 12 percent of Americans ages 16 and older who read e-books say they have borrowed an e-book from a library in the past year.The study found most Americans are not aware they can borrow e-books from libraries, even though three-quarters of US public libraries offer the service.

Ownership of electronic book readers such as Amazon's Kindle has doubled among US adults over the past six months, from six percent to 12 percent, according to a survey published on Monday.The survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project found that adoption of touchscreen tablet computers such as Apple's iPad was growing more slowly among Americans aged 18 or older.E-reader ownership doubled between November 2010 and May 2011 to 12 percent while the tablet computer ownership grew from five percent in November to eight percent in May, Pew said.

Facebook is driving an increasing amount of traffic to news sites but Google remains the top referring service, according to a study published on Monday.The study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at the behaviour of news consumers online during the first nine months of 2010 using audience statistics from the Nielsen Co.The study examined the 25 most popular news websites in the United States, looking at how users get to the sites, how long they stay there, how deep they explore a site and where they go when they leave.