Holiday sales could launch e-book readers as mass-market must-haves - washingtonpost.com

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As sales soar, digital works face season's crucial test

By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 5, 2009

Technology is stalking your bookcase.

It has already taken over your photo albums and emptied your film canisters. It overwhelmed your music collection and flooded Goodwill with CD towers. It canceled your newspaper subscription. (Sniff, tear.)

And now, digital evangelicals believe technology is on the verge of supplanting those dusty, yellowed tomes that weigh three times more than an iPod and don't even come with any cool free apps.

Sales of electronic books jumped 68.4 percent last year and skyrocketed 177 percent to $96.6 million for the year through August, according to the Association of American Publishers. That's not counting the millions downloaded for free at public libraries, where e-books are fast becoming one of the most popular features. And Amazon has said that its e-book reader, the Kindle, has become the best-selling product on its Web site.

But despite the staggering growth, e-books remain just a sliver of the overall publishing industry, at 1.5 percent of the $6.8 billion in sales this year -- about on par with audiobooks. And some experts believe that the $200-plus price tag for e-book readers will keep the market from exploding the way MP3s did.

Holiday hopes

This holiday season will be a crucial test of whether e-books can cross over from geeky novelty to mass-market must-have. Major retailers are pushing the format -- and, of course, the gadgets they've developed to display it. Barnes & Noble unveiled its first electronic book reader last month, with access to all of the retailer's titles and then some. Amazon and Sony, which make the two best-selling e-readers in the country, have introduced new versions just in time to stuff your stocking. And this holiday, for the first time, Best Buy is devoting store space to educating shoppers about e-readers.

All told, about 1.2 million e-readers are expected to be sold in the last three months of the year -- roughly 40 percent of the entire year's stock. By the end of 2010, industry experts predict, 10 million people will be carrying e-readers. As for the number of e-books that people have read, they've lost track.

Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division, can hear his grandkids' grandkids now: You printed 1,000 pages and you made a million copies of those? Why did you do that?

"To me, it's just inevitable," says Haber, who knew printed books were goners when people told him they liked to touch and feel them. "I heard the same thing from LPs and CDs. The mass market, they want convenience and experience."

Already, we buy roughly as many printed books online as we do at chain bookstores. Each claims more than 20 percent of the market and alternates at the top spot, while independent sellers claim just 5 percent of the market, according to PubTrack, a survey conducted by publishing industry research firm Bowker. If it only takes one click to buy a book, why should we have to wait to read it?

The Amazon effect

Amazon executives have made near-instantaneous content a company goal. The latest Kindle, which began shipping last month, holds 1,500 titles and can wirelessly download books in 60 seconds. The company envisions a day when any book ever printed in any language can be downloaded in one minute.

Ginny Wolfe, 51, of Alexandria brought her Kindle to Afghanistan, where she is working for a few weeks as a private contractor; the device is loaded with 350 books, including "White Ghost Girls" by Alice Greenway and "The Invisible Mountain" by Carolina De Robertis. In the old days -- like, pre-2007, before the Kindle was released -- Wolfe would pack an extra suitcase on her work trips, just for books.

"I used to panic, thinking I might run out of things to read. That doesn't happen anymore," she writes in an e-mail, although she adds that she misplaced her Kindle for two days in Kabul, resulting in escalating drama until it turned up in a restaurant.

It is difficult to overstate the impact that Amazon has had on the publishing industry, both when Amazon began selling print books nearly 15 years ago and when it launched the Kindle two years ago. In both cases, the company struck fear in the hearts of publishers by lowering prices.

According to Bowker, the average price of an e-book this year is $8.30. The cost of a hardcover book -- the most profitable format for publishers -- is $14.55. The difference is particularly painful for publishers because e-book buyers tend to be readers who used to be hardcover buyers, says Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publishing services for Bowker.

Worse, the industry can't raise prices on e-books to match those of hardcovers because Amazon established $9.99 pricing for e-books, and consumers expect virtual products to be cheaper than actual ones, he says. To fight back, publisher HarperCollins is delaying the e-book version of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's potentially best-selling memoir until after Christmas to help bolster hardcover sales.

"We've always kind of painted ourselves into a corner," Gallagher says.

Although the Association of American Publishers estimates that sales of e-books account for only 1.5 percent of all books, the medium's triple-digit growth has publishers on guard. Sales are outpacing most forecasts at a time when the book industry has seen sales declines. Adult paperbacks have dropped 9 percent to $908 million for the year through August, while hardcover sales plunged 12 percent to $738.6 million. Since it was launched last year, more than 2 million people have downloaded the free app Stanza to their iPhones to read e-books.

"The trend that the Kindle has started has grown far beyond Amazon," says Sarah Rotman Epps, senior analyst for consulting firm Forrester Research. "There are some companies that are on this for years and are finally seeing consumer demand building."

The e-reader market

Forrester's profile of the current e-reader enthusiast is a 47-year-old married man with a college degree and an average household income of $116,000. About 30 percent of e-reader owners use them on business trips, while about 17 percent rely on e-readers during commutes. They read about 3.5 books each month, more than the average Internet user. About 83 percent consider themselves "technology optimists."

The second wave that is emerging is composed of slightly younger men who may already be reading a few e-books on their iPhones or laptops and are graduating to e-readers. But to go truly mass-market, e-books will have to appeal to women, who tend to be warier of new technology and more price-conscious, Epps says. Harlequin, purveyor of those lusty supermarket bodice-rippers, has dipped into the market with an e-book subscription service for some series, like Silhouette Desire, "delivering the provocative passion you crave." And no one can see you put it in your shopping cart!

Can passion overcome the high price of e-readers? Epps performed an analysis of how much shoppers are willing to pay for an e-reader, and the point of mass appeal was $50 -- less than it costs to make the device.

Epps doesn't think that today's e-readers will do for e-books what the iPod did for MP3s. Even if 10 million people are toting an e-book reader at the end of next year, that's less than 1 percent of the 110 million people who have MP3 players. And at current prices, she believes the market for e-readers will top out at 25 million. Gallagher of Bowker says laptops still remain the primary mode for reading e-books.

Epps thinks the trend will look more like what happened to digital cameras, which took about a decade to catch on before exploding in popularity but are now taking a back seat to camera phones.

Book clubs and gadget geeks alike are buzzing about rumors that Apple is secretly developing a tablet-style device that combines an e-reader with other computing wizardry. An Apple spokeswoman did not respond to requests for information. But if the ubiquitous iPods and iPhones are yardsticks, an Apple e-reader could be the tipping point for digital books.

Sex appeal

Unless, of course, you are 40-something Hilton Henderson of Fairfax, who cannot fathom any reason why he would ever choose to read a book on a screen. Call him old-fashioned. Call him a Luddite. Or, Henderson helpfully suggests, call him a romantic.

A friend of his recently compared books to attractive women -- glorious to behold! -- and the comparison resonated with him. Reading an e-book, he says, is about as appealing to him as cybersex.

Yes, he went there.

"I prefer actually the experience, when reading a book, of using all my senses, like when I experience the world," Henderson says. "The touch of it, the feel of it, the scent of it."

All good points. But Sony's Haber argues that if it's women you're after, technology is man's best friend. Pull out a book in a bar and you look lonely. But whip out a Sony Reader and watch the magic happen.

"If you want to meet a girl," he says, "don't get a dog, get a reader."

Social Isolation and New Technology - Pew Internet & American Life Project

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This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey is the first ever that examines the role of the internet and cell phones in the way that people interact with those in their core social network. Our key findings challenge previous research and commonplace fears about the harmful social impact of new technology:

» Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. We find that the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then. Only 6% of the adult population has no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they consider to be “especially significant” in their life.

» We confirm that Americans’ discussion networks have shrunk by about a third since 1985 and have become less diverse because they contain fewer non-family members. However, contrary to the considerable concern that people’s use of the internet and cell phones could be tied to the trend towards smaller networks, we find that ownership of a mobile phone and participation in a variety of internet activities are associated with larger and more diverse core discussion networks. (Discussion networks are a key measure of people’s most important social ties.)

» Social media activities are associated with several beneficial social activities, including having discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds. For instance, frequent internet users, and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race. Those who share photos online are more likely to report that they discuss important matters with someone who is a member of another political party.

» When we examine people’s full personal network – their strong ties and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with having a more diverse social network. Again, this flies against the notion that technology pulls people away from social engagement.

» Some have worried that internet use limits people’s participation in their local communities, but we find that most internet activities have little or a positive relationship to local activity. For instance, internet users are as likely as anyone else to visit with their neighbors in person. Cell phone users, those who use the internet frequently at work, and bloggers are more likely to belong to a local voluntary association, such as a youth group or a charitable organization. However, we find some evidence that use of social networking services (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn) substitutes for some neighborhood involvement.

» Internet use does not pull people away from public places. Rather, it is associated with engagement in places such as parks, cafes, and restaurants, the kinds of locales where research shows that people are likely to encounter a wider array of people and diverse points of view. Indeed, internet access has become a common component of people’s experiences within many public spaces. For instance, of those Americans who have been in a library within the past month, 38% logged on to the internet while they were there, 18% have done so in a café or coffee shop.

» People’s mobile phone use outpaces their use of landline phones as a primary method of staying in touch with their closest family and friends, but face-to-face contact still trumps all other methods. On average in a typical year, people have in-person contact with their core network ties on about 210 days; they have mobile-phone contact on 195 days of the year; landline phone contact on 125 days; text-messaging contact on the mobile phone 125 days; email contact 72 days; instant messaging contact 55 days; contact via social networking websites 39 days; and contact via letters or cards on 8 days.

» Challenging the assumption that internet use encourages social contact across vast distances, we find that many internet technologies are used as much for local contact as they are for distant communication.

Next: Overview

Most College Students To Take Classes Online by 2014 -- Campus Technology

Nearly 12 million post-secondary students in the United States take some or all of their classes online right now. But this number will skyrocket to more than 22 million in the next five years, according to data released recently by research firm Ambient Insight.

According to Ambient Insight Chief Research Officer Sam S. Adkins, already some 1.25 million students in higher education programs take all of their classes online, while another 10.65 take some of their classes online. The two groups are still outnumbered by students who take all of their courses in physical classrooms, which Ambient Insight reckoned at 15.14 million as of 2009.

But this situation will change drastically by 2014, at which time, Adkins forecast, only 5.14 million students will take all of their courses in a physical classroom, while 3.55 million will take all of their classes online, and 18.65 million will take some of their classes online.

The information was presented in a Webinar that coincided with a new report from Ambient Insight focusing on the growth of the electronic learning market (in terms of dollars spent on products and services) from 2009 to 2014. Titled "US Self-paced eLearning Market," the new report highlighted some of the dominant segments in online learning. Of the individual segments spotlighted in the research, healthcare was projected to see the most growth over the next five years. But K-12 and higher education growth followed in second and third position, respectively, for a combined academic projected growth percentage greater than that of healthcare. K-12 was projected to grow about 18 percent by 2014; higher education was projected to grow more than 8 percent. Healthcare was projected to grow a little less than 20 percent over the next five years.

"The rate of growth in the academic segments," said Ambient CEO Tyson Greer, in a prepared statement, "is due in part to the success and proliferation of the for-profit online schools."

Across all segments, the market for electronic learning products and services, at present, is $16.7 billion. According to the report, this will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7.4 percent over the next five years to $23.8 billion in 2014.

"In the past two years, the rate of growth for online learning products has slowed," Adkins wrote in a statement. "Yet, despite the recession, and in many cases, because of it, the demand is positive in all the online learning buyer segments....."

An executive summary of Ambient Insight's report, "US Self-paced eLearning Market," can be found here. The full report runs $4,825. Ambient will also be releasing a worldwide report on electronic learning in November. We'll have more information about that when it becomes available.

About the Author

Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's online education publications and electronic newsletters. He can be reached at dnagel@1105media.com. He can now be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/THEJournalDave (K-12) or http://twitter.com/CampusTechDave (higher education).

BBC - China to ban beating web addicts

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China's ministry of health has moved to ban the use of physical punishment to treat teenagers addicted to the web, according to draft guidelines.

There are dozens of treatment centres offering to wean youths, mostly boys, from spending hours on the web.

Many of them are military-style boot camps that rely on tough programmes of physical exercise and counselling.

Two boys were beaten at separate camps earlier this year, one died and the other was severely injured.

"When intervening to prevent improper use of the internet we should... strictly prohibit restriction of personal freedom and physical punishments," the ministry said in a draft guideline quoted by Reuters news agency.

In July, the ministry of health formally banned the use of electroshock therapy as a treatment option.

There was a public outcry after 15-year-old Deng Senshan died in August less than 24 hours after arrival at the Qihang Salvation Training Camp in Guangxi province.

Days later, 14-year-old Pu Liang was put in a Sichuan hospital in a series condition after allegedly being beaten by his boot camp's principal and other students.

Some estimates suggest up to 10% of the country's 100 million web users under the age of 20 could be addicted, and a growing number of rehabilitation services have sprung up to deal with the problem.

Some define an internet addict as anyone who is online for at least six hours a day and has little interest in school.

"The goal of intervention is... to urge the target people to use the internet in a healthy way," the ministry of health statement said.

"It's not to stop them from using the internet."

BBC - Thai envoy recalled from Cambodia

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Thailand has recalled its ambassador from Cambodia over its appointment of ousted Thai leader Thaksin Shinawatra as a government economic adviser.

Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said the step was "the first diplomatic retaliation measure" to express the concern of the Thai people.

Mr Thaksin was ousted by the military in 2006. A court convicted him in absentia of corruption last year.

Recent border skirmishes have also strained Thai-Cambodian relations.

Divisive figure

Phnom Penh announced on Wednesday that Mr Thaksin would serve as a special adviser both to the government and to Prime Minister Hun Sen.

State television said Cambodia would refuse to extradite the tycoon because it considered him a victim of political persecution.

A government spokesman told the BBC that Cambodia valued Mr Thaksin's leadership qualities and business experience and that he would be an asset to the country.

Mr Abhisit accused Cambodia of interfering in Thailand's internal affairs, and a foreign ministry official said bilateral co-operation agreements would be reviewed.

"Last night's announcement by the Cambodian government harmed the Thai justice system and really affected Thai public sentiment," Mr Abhisit said.

Mr Thaksin - who has lived mostly overseas since he was ousted - remains a divisive figure in Thailand.

Since the coup, both supporters and opponents of the former telecommunications mogul have repeatedly taken to the streets of Bangkok in large protests, some of which have turned violent.

Thailand's relationship with Cambodia has also become more volatile in recent months.

Troops have clashed sporadically around the border temple of Preah Vihear, which both claim as their territory.

BBC - Resignations in Indonesia scandal

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Two of Indonesia's senior law enforcement officials have resigned over a growing corruption scandal.

Deputy attorney general Abdul Hakim Ritonga and Chief Detective Susno Duadji were linked to an alleged plot to weaken the anti-corruption agency.

Their names came up in recordings in which the suspected plot was allegedly discussed by police and prosecutors.

The case is being seen as a test of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's promises to clamp down on corruption.

The president said more resignations or suspensions could be expected.

"I've advised the police chief and the attorney general to suspend those whose names were mentioned in the tape recordings and discharge them from their duties," AFP news agency quoted him as telling a cabinet meeting.

The resignations of Mr Ritonga and Ch Det Susno Duadji came after calls for their dismissal from Indonesians who have taken to the streets protesting against the suspected plot to weaken the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).

Indonesia's Watergate

Human rights groups say the KPK has become a target of the police force because it has been so successful in investigating and charging corrupt officials.

Indonesia is often ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, but the efforts of the KPK have encouraged investors to believe the country is trying to clean up its act, says the BBC's Karishma Vaswani in Jakarta.

The case, which has been dubbed Indonesia's Watergate, has transfixed the nation, says our correspondent.

The tapes were played in a nationally televised session of the Constitutional Court, as part of the defence of two KPK officials arrested on bribery charges.

Corrupt officials

The recorded discussion is allegedly between a businessman and several people thought to be in Indonesia's powerful police force and the attorney general's office.

Discussions on the tapes revealed the speakers were involved in plans to significantly weaken the KPK by implicating two of their officials in bribery charges.

It is a powerful body that has gained the reputation of being tough on corrupt officials - including those in high places, says our Jakarta correspondent.

The KPK officials, Chandra Hamzah and Bibit Samad Riyanto, were released on Tuesday.

BBC - Afghan strife makes UN relocate

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The UN says it will temporarily relocate 600 of its international foreign staff based in Afghanistan.

The personnel would return to work once security had been boosted at unsecured accommodation used by the UN, it said.

The transfer would not affect work such as aid delivery, as this was done by local Afghan staff, the UN added.

The move follows a dawn raid by the Taliban last week on a hostel in the capital, Kabul, which left five UN workers and three Afghans dead.

The attack on the private Bekhtar guesthouse in the Shar-i-Naw district last Wednesday was the deadliest on the UN in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.

ANALYSIS
Andrew North, BBC News, Kabul It may be a temporary move by the UN, but it is a drastic one.

The UN insists emergency programmes, such as delivering food aid, will continue.

But relocating nearly half its international staff for up to four weeks, while security is upgraded, will inevitably disrupt some operations.

Some may feel it is over-reacting. Other humanitarian agencies are so far not following the UN lead.

But last week's attack has had a devastating impact on UN morale here, comparable to the 2003 suicide bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad.

Six years later, UN staff in Iraq still work under draconian security restrictions, severely limiting what they can do.

A key question will be how much new security procedures here will affect the ability of UN staff to continue working Afghanistan.

On Monday, also citing security concerns, the UN halted long-term development work in north-western Pakistan, a region bordering Afghanistan viewed as a haven for Taliban and al-Qaeda militants.

In a Kabul news conference on Thursday, Kai Eide, the head of the UN's Afghan mission, said some of the staff - mostly "non-frontline" personnel - would be moved within the country, others outside.

"We are not talking about pulling out and we are not talking about evacuation," the Norwegian diplomat said.

The temporary relocation of staff was likely to take three to four weeks, the UN said.

The UN has up to 1,300 international staff - out of a workforce of about 5,600 - based in Afghanistan.

The personnel to be moved come from all UN agencies and different Afghan cities.

Mr Eide told the BBC later: "It's quite clear that the security situation for our staff has become much more complex over the last year."

“ This will have a huge impact on our operation here. It will take longer and it will be more difficult to achieve our goals. ”
UN worker

But he said the Taliban would not succeed in driving the UN out of Afghanistan, in the same way it was forced from Iraq six years ago after a suicide truck bombing on a UN compound killed a top envoy and more than 20 others.

"We will certainly continue our work, but we are taking the measures in order to do so and we are enhancing our security," said Mr Eide.

Meanwhile, British forces are continuing to hunt the Afghan policeman who shot dead five UK soldiers on Tuesday in Helmand.

They are investigating whether the gunman - who opened fire in a compound where the UK troops had been mentoring Afghan police - is linked to the Taliban.

In the guesthouse raid last week, UN employees tried to flee as three heavily armed Taliban militants hiding explosive vests under police uniforms attacked.

THE UN IN AFGHANISTAN

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) - set up in 2002 - is the umbrella body for all UN agencies

Role is to promote peace and stability in Afghanistan focusing on humanitarian and political issues

Most UN agencies have a major presence in Afghanistan

Major areas of activity include reconstruction, food distribution, political outreach and elections

UN employs about 5,600 staff across Afghanistan

UN also works in partnership with hundreds of governmental and non-governmental organisations

The three gunmen were shot dead.

The hostel - which had been used by the UN and other international organisations - was gutted by fire.

Foreign officials have warned that the Kabul government's reputation for corruption and the recent crisis surrounding the fraud-marred presidential election are fuelling the Taliban insurgency.

Security has continued to deteriorate, despite the presence of more than 100,000 Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), including about 68,000 Americans.

On Thursday Isaf said it was investigating reports that civilians had been killed in a rocket attack by Nato forces on insurgents allegedly planting a bomb in Lashkar Gar, Helmand province.

US President Barack Obama is currently considering a request from the US commander in Afghanistan for another 40,000 troops.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown last month announced 500 extra British soldiers would be sent.

Can Obsessive Networking Make You a Good Employee? - WSJ.com

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By JEFFREY ZASLOW

A 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the vice principal's office at Millwood High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy he needed to focus on the teacher, not his cellphone. The boy listened politely and nodded, and that's when Mr. Gallagher noticed the student's fingers moving on his lap.

He was texting while being reprimanded for texting.

"It was a subconscious act," says Mr. Gallagher, who took the phone away. "Young people today are connected socially from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close their eyes at night. It's compulsive."

Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing—accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites—there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can "hyper-socializing" students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook?

Some argue they can accomplish a great deal: This generation has a gift for multitasking, and because they've integrated technology into their lives, their ability to remain connected to each other will serve them and their employers well. Others contend that these hyper-socializers are serial time-wasters, that the bonds between them are shallow, and that their face-to-face interpersonal skills are poor.

"The unspoken attitude is, 'I don't need you. I have the Internet,'" says P.M. Forni, the 58-year-old director of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, which studies politeness and manners. "The Net provides an opportunity to play hide-and-seek, to say and not say, to be truthful and to pretend. There is a lot of communication going on that is futile and trivial."

That's far too harsh an assessment, says Ben Bajarin, 32, a technology analyst at Creative Strategies, a consulting firm in Campbell, Calif. He argues that because young people are so adept at multimedia socializing, their social skills are actually strengthened. They're good at "managing conversations" and getting to the pithy essence of an issue, he says, which will help them in the workplace.

While their older colleagues waste time holding meetings or engaging in long phone conversations, young people have an ability to sum things up in one-sentence text messages, Mr. Bajarin says. "They know how to optimize and prioritize. They will call or set up a meeting if it's needed. If not, they text." And given their vast network of online acquaintances, they discover people who can become true friends or valued business colleagues—people they wouldn't have been able to find in the pre-Internet era.

It's hard to quantify whether the abbreviated interchanges of text messaging are beneficial in the workplace, but this much is known: Young workers spend more time than older workers socializing via their devices or entertaining themselves online. In a 2008 survey for Salary.com, 53% of those under age 24 said this was their primary "time wasting" activity while at work, compared to just 34% for those between ages 41 and 65.

Online social networking while at work hampers business productivity, according to a new study by Nucleus Research. Almost two-thirds of those with Facebook accounts access them at their workplaces, the study found, which translates to a 1.5% loss of total employee productivity across an organization.

A study this year by psychology students at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga., found that the more time young people spend on Facebook, the more likely they are to have lower grades and weaker study habits. Heavy Facebook users show signs of being more gregarious, but they are also more likely to be anxious, hostile or depressed. (Doctors, meanwhile, are now blaming addictions to "night texting" for disturbing the sleep patterns of teens.)

Weaned From Facebook

Almost a quarter of today's teens check Facebook more than 10 times a day, according to a 2009 survey by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that monitors media's impact on families. Will these young people wean themselves of this habit once they enter the work force, or will employers come to see texting and "social-network checking" as accepted parts of the workday?

Think back. When today's older workers were in their 20s, they might have taken a break on the job to call friends and make after-work plans. In those earlier eras, companies discouraged non-business-related calls, and someone who made personal calls all day risked being fired. It was impossible to envision the constant back-and-forth texting that defines interactions among young people today.

However, now that these older workers are managers, they're being advised by consultants to accept the changed dynamics, so long as young employees are doing good work and meeting deadlines.

Educators are also being asked by parents, students and educational strategists to reconsider their rules. In past generations, students got in trouble for passing notes in class. Now students are adept at texting with their phones still in their pockets, says 40-year-old Mr. Gallagher, the vice principal, "and they're able to communicate with someone one floor down and three rows over. Students are just fundamentally different today. They will take suspensions rather than give up their phones."

It may feel like a strange new world, but Mr. Gallagher's wife, Holly, is among those who say it's time for educators and employers to embrace it. As a human-resources manager, she believes that as the generation now aged 15 to 24 enters the work force, managers must adjust to the new ways they socialize and communicate.

For instance, past generations accepted that corporations were hierarchical. There were supervisors, managers and senior managers, and you communicated your questions to your immediate superior. "Young people today want accessibility," says Ms. Gallagher, 41. "If they have a problem or suggestion, they'll email or text senior managers, or even the CEO. They don't have the old-school notion that there are appropriate communication models. They've grown up in a freedom-of-information era."

Preparing for Work

She thinks the constant text messaging among teens can serve as good preparation for workplace interactions. "In a lot of corporations, if something goes wrong, it's because so-and-so didn't talk to so-and-so," Ms. Gallagher says. "But with young people, simultaneous conversations are always happening. This reduces the chances of not reaching success because the right people didn't connect."

More schools are now allowing students to use their cellphones between classes, or even as a learning tool in the classroom. Some teachers are having students text their friends during classes to share feedback on what's being taught. The mantra among educators who try to be enlightened: It's no longer about attention span. It's about attention scope—being able to concentrate on many things at once.

Steve Gallagher is finding it futile to argue with his students that they should go a seven-hour school day without their texting devices. As he explains: "It's like talking to kids about why they don't need air."

—Email: Jeffrey.Zaslow@ wsj.com

Yahoo to Add Real-Time Search Results - WSJ.com

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By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Yahoo Inc. said it is testing a new search feature that will show people results based on relevant information being shared by Internet users in real-time.

People familiar with the matter said Yahoo is testing real-time search results through a partnership with Web search start-up OneRiot Inc., along with other companies. The OneRiot test is scheduled to go live this week.

In a statement, Yahoo said the real-time shortcuts will only appear on certain search queries and that the company is still weighing whether to integrate the results across its user base.

The OneRiot deal is independent from Yahoo's deal to outsource some of its search features to Microsoft Corp., according to a person familiar with the matter.

Unlike traditional Web search results, which are ranked by methods like analyzing what sort of Web pages link to a particular Web page, OneRiot's results are based on the links that people are sharing through services like Twitter and Digg and other data. Searching OneRiot for "Michelle Obama," for instance, may bring up a link to reports about her recent Halloween costume instead of a link to a biography.

Yahoo's move underscores how the largest search properties are focusing on timelier search results.

In October, Microsoft and Google Inc. announced deals with Twitter designed to help them add similar capabilities to their search services.

Still, the search engines are faced with the challenge of figuring out when real-time content is relevant or just clutter. In addition, the business model for real-time search is murky.

In an interview last week, Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams said Twitter is trying to tackle some of those problems. The San Francisco company is devoting more engineering resources to its own Twitter search engine and is focusing on how to show people the most relevant tweet, Mr. Williams said, not just the latest one that matches the terms they searched.

Revolutionary Guards Extend Reach to Iran's Media - WSJ.com

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Planned News Agency Fits With Move to Dominate Accounts of Events; 'They Want to Control Public Opinion'

By FARNAZ FASSIHI

Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, already an economic, political and military power, is quietly pushing into a new domain: the media.

By March, the Revolutionary Guards plan to launch Atlas, a news agency modeled on services such as the Associated Press and the British Broadcasting Corp., according to semiofficial Iranian news sites. The move comes as the Guards are increasing control over the conservative Fars News Agency, which has become the mouthpiece of the Iranian regime. Fars denies that it is linked to the Guards.

On Thursday, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi, the head of the Basij, a Revolutionary Guard volunteer task force, announced what he called a new era of "super media power" cooperation between the media and the Revolutionary Guards, according to official Iranian news outlets.

Analysts say the Guards aim to control the official account of events coming out of Iran and offer a counternarrative to reports published by independent and reformist media outlets.

The Guards "want to dominate the flow of information and be the ones telling the world what's going on in Iran," says Omid Memarian, a dissident journalist who now lives in the U.S. and who did his military service with the Guards.

Last week, the government awarded Fars first place for best news agency at Iran's annual media fair. At the same time, it has shut down reformist newspapers and Web sites. On Monday, business newspaper Sarmayeh, which has been critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's economic policies, was shut down. The official IRNA news agency said the daily was closed because its content strayed from business topics.

The Revolutionary Guards, created shortly after the 1979 revolution, have increased their influence since 2005 during the administration of President Ahmadinejad, himself a former member. The government's current slate of cabinet ministers, provincial governors, ambassadors and lawmakers draws heavily from former members or commanders of the Guards.

In October, a business unit of the Guards bought 51% of the shares of Iran's Telecommunications Co. from the government for about $8 billion, effectively gaining control of the country's telephone landlines, all Internet providers and two mobile-phone companies. (The government directly owns the rest of the company.)

The Guards control Iran's strategic long-range missiles and have business holdings in sectors from oil and gas to construction, shipping and telecommunications. When unrest erupted across Iran after the disputed re-election of Mr. Ahmadinejad in June, the Guards were responsible for a crackdown to restore security.

In September, two Fars News Agency photographers, Javad Moghimi, 24 years old, and Hossein Salmanzadeh, 34, fled to Turkey and requested asylum. Their account of the Guards' presence at Fars offers insight into the force's media connections.

The two men say they left Iran after receiving a warning from Fars News' managing editor, a former Revolutionary Guards commander, following pictures they took of opposition protests. Both men say they were taking pictures anonymously and selling them to foreign agencies abroad.

"We were insiders defying orders to not cover opposition gatherings. They considered what we did treason," says Mr. Moghimi, whose picture of a demonstration in Tehran made the cover of Time magazine in June.

Experts say Fars News content closely mirrors the tone and language of the Revolutionary Guard weekly magazine, Sobh-e-Sadegh. The agency's top editors and editorial board are all former Guard commanders. Fars is housed in a building owned by the Guards in central Tehran that was previously the headquarters of the force's intelligence unit.

Fars News Agency's head of public relations, who gave his name as Mr. Salehi, denied when reached by phone in Tehran that the agency was affiliated with the government or the Revolutionary Guards, but declined to elaborate.

Mr. Moghimi and Mr. Salmanzadeh joined Fars when it was created, about seven years ago. The Guard presence has become more visible during Mr. Ahmadinejad's administration, says Mr. Salmanzadeh, who was the agency's deputy photo editor. Many editors were removed, including top management, and Guard members with no journalism experience took their positions, Mr. Salmanzadeh and other people familiar with the situation say.

The new management put editorial restrictions on the staff, the two photographers say. Reporters had to write favorable pieces about the government, and photographers had to angle their camera lenses to show bigger crowds during pro-government rallies, they say. Staff were banned from covering Christmas because it promoted Christianity, and couldn't take pictures of Turkish whirling dervishes because they promote mystical Islam, the photographers and others say, and pictures of women were allowed only if the women were properly veiled.

Journalists from Fars News took part in interrogating dissidents, according to several dissidents who say there were journalists present jotting notes in a corner during the dissidents' interrogations in 2007.

This past spring, in the months leading up to the June presidential election, Fars created a "journalism center," Tavana Club, to train young, hard-line Basij volunteers, according to Iranian media. In July, as protests against the June election results intensified, Fars fired 39 independent reporters from its staff for not being in line with the organization's new policies, and replaced them with the newly trained hard-liners, according to Iranian media reports.

Fars declined to comment on the dismissals. The Fars Web site added an icon to its home page titled "the Velvet Revolution," with daily updates explaining how the opposition was funded and orchestrated by Western countries, including the U.S. and the U.K.

Mr. Moghimi and Mr. Salmanzadeh left Iran separately in early September, without saying goodbye to their families, after the warning from Fars News' managing editor.

The two men now live as refugees in a tiny apartment in a small town in central Turkey with little furniture and no heat. They have applied for asylum at the Ankara offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

"The Revolutionary Guard now understands that political power is interconnected to media power, and they want to control public opinion," says Ali Alfoneh, a visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, who has studied the Guards extensively.

Write to Farnaz Fassihi at farnaz.fassihi@wsj.com

Health Care Debate Focuses on Legal Immigrants - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By JULIA PRESTON

The debate over health care for illegal immigrants continues to percolate in Congress despite the Obama administration’s efforts to put it to rest, with lawmakers in both houses also wrangling over how much coverage to provide for immigrants who have settled in the country legally.

Some Republicans favor excluding immigrants who have been legal permanent residents for less than five years, as well as all illegal immigrants. Democrats broadly agree that illegal immigrants should be excluded, but many want all legal permanent residents to be able to participate in proposed health insurance exchanges and receive subsidized coverage if they qualify.

Latino leaders, worried that Congress might quietly cut back benefits for legal immigrants, have started an 11th-hour campaign to eliminate waiting periods for them in the proposed legislation and to cancel the existing five-year wait for Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Under some plans being considered by Congress, more than one million legal permanent residents and about seven million illegal immigrants who currently have no health insurance would be excluded from coverage, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

Any proposal under discussion would leave California with the largest population of uninsured residents, as many as 1.4 million legal and illegal immigrants, according to a study by the Center for Health Policy Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. California’s health system has been crippled by the soaring costs of caring for 6.8 million residents with no insurance, a figure that includes about 4 million American citizens.

Large numbers of immigrants in Florida, New York and Texas would also remain without coverage under the proposals.

While generally ceding the fight to gain coverage for illegal immigrants, groups like the American Hospital Association, the United States Conference of Mayors, and the Catholic Health Association, among others, have urged Congress to eliminate any waiting periods for legal residents in future programs and for Medicare and Medicaid. Such exclusions, they say, tend to defeat the cost-saving purposes of universal coverage.

“You can either keep those immigrants healthy now, or exclude them and wait until they get really sick, then pay for it down the line,” said Prof. Steven P. Wallace, associate director of the U.C.L.A. research center. “If you don’t pay now, you’re going to pay for them later.”

Republicans argue that maximizing restrictions on legal and illegal immigrants will save money and prevent health care benefits from becoming a magnet that draws new migrants to the United States. The five-year wait for Medicare and Medicaid was first imposed on legal permanent residents as part of the federal welfare overhaul in 1996.

Under all plans under consideration, immigrants who are excluded from new programs, including illegal immigrants, would still be required to buy health insurance.

In September, Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, caused a furor during a joint session of Congress when he accused President Obama of lying about whether Democratic health proposals would cover illegal immigrants. Since then, battles over health care for immigrants have been waged less openly, in closed-door negotiations and dueling amendments in committee. With Democratic leaders in the House and Senate pushing to move bills to the floor in coming days, lawmakers from both parties are working to line up immigration amendments for full debate.

There is broad agreement in Washington on barring illegal immigrants from taxpayer-financed coverage. White House officials have also said that illegal immigrants should be excluded from buying coverage through insurance exchanges that are proposed to increase competition.

Instead, the debate has been over measures to verify applicants’ citizenship status. Both the Senate and House bills now call for relatively simple proof of identity, like a driver’s license or Social Security card, lawmakers said.

Representative Nathan Deal of Georgia, the senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, said he would try to offer an amendment to require a second document to verify immigration or citizenship status. Mr. Deal accused the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, of leaving loopholes that would allow “illegal aliens to slip in through the cracks.”

An Obama Relative in China Relates His Own Journey - NYTimes.com

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By ANDREW JACOBS

GUANGZHOU, China — Maybe it is the easy smile. Or perhaps the eyes, at once self-assured and searching. When Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo walks into the room, the similarities with President Obama, with whom he shares a father, are unmistakable if hard to pinpoint.

The father, Barack Obama Sr., was an imposing presence, a baritone-voiced charmer prone to haughty outbursts. The sons turned out to be thoughtful and unafraid of self-doubt. In height, complexion and gait, the resemblances are striking.

Mr. Obama hardly knew his father, who left home when the younger Obama was 2. Mr. Ndesandjo, however, grew up in the stormy presence of a man he said he came to hate. “My father beat me and my mother, and this is something you just don’t do,” said Mr. Ndesandjo, 43, who was raised in Kenya but whose American accent is the product of international schools. “He was a brilliant man, but as my mother used to say, he was a social failure.”

Over the last decade, as Mr. Obama’s political career took him to the apex of the world’s most powerful nation, Mr. Ndesandjo’s life fell apart, then slowly came together again. After losing his job at Lucent, the telecommunications equipment company, he left the United States in 2002 to start a new life in China. He taught English, gave piano lessons to orphans and helped a friend open a chain of barbecue restaurants. Last year, he married a Chinese woman.

The president is significantly closer to his relatives on his mother’s side of the family. Friends say he knows his half brother, who traveled to Washington earlier this year, but does not have a close relationship with him.

Until now Mr. Ndesandjo has avoided the press, wrapping himself in the anonymity of Shenzhen, a former fishing village near Hong Kong that is now a city of eight million newcomers. Friends say he never spoke of his connection to the president. “I didn’t want anything to do with the Obama name,” he said.

But Mr. Ndesandjo has now decided to publicize himself, having written an autobiographical novel, “Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East,” that reflects his wanderings, the wrestling over his racial identity, his quest to find acceptance in modern China, and mostly, the struggle to understand his father. “I wanted to find something redeeming about him,” he said in an interview last week, the prelude to a modest book publicity campaign culminating Wednesday in a news conference here.

Mr. Ndesandjo’s journey mirrors that of the president, whose autobiographical memoir, “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” details his own drive to make peace with his father, a Kenyan goat herder who went on to earn a graduate degree from Harvard but who abandoned Mr. Obama and his mother in Hawaii. In all, the elder Obama had eight children by four women before dying in 1982 in a car accident at age 46.

At the end of his memoir, Mr. Obama weeps at the grave of his father in a cathartic moment. “I felt the circle finally close,” he wrote. “The pain I felt was my father’s pain.”

Mr. Ndesandjo finds his own closure by inventing his father’s diary, which gives the book’s protagonist insight into his father’s philandering, outbursts and a self-destructive decline that paralleled Kenya’s descent into corruption and tribal conflict.

The two boys, born of American mothers but half a world from each other, knew little of each other growing up and Mr. Ndesandjo declined to fill in the blanks of their relationship. The details, he said, would have to await a true autobiography that he said was in the works.

He did say that Mr. Obama’s election was a crystallizing moment, prompting the completion of his book and forcing him to confront issues that had dogged him. “Emotions and attitudes that had been around for so many years were turned upside down within a few weeks,” he said, tearful.

Mr. Obama, in his book, describes his first encounter with Mr. Ndesandjo, in which he heaped scorn on his father and the backwardness of Kenya. “You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots, that sort of thing,” Mr. Obama quotes him as saying. “Well, you’re right.”

Like his half brother, Mr. Ndesandjo struggled with issues of racial identity. His mother, Ruth Ndesandjo, is an American Jew, born Ruth Nidesand, who met the elder Mr. Obama during his time in Cambridge, then followed him to Africa. Mrs. Ndesandjo, who still lives in Nairobi, had two sons. The other, David, died in a motorcycle accident.

Being of mixed race has never been easy, Mr. Ndesandjo said, whether in Kenya, America or China, where non-Chinese can become inured to stares. “I think to a certain extent I’ve always been an outsider,” he said.

After high school Mr. Ndesandjo moved to the United States, earning degrees in physics from Brown and Stanford and an M.B.A. from Emory University. He also devoted himself to classical piano, inspired by his grandmother, a Lithuanian immigrant whose love of the arts left a mark on him. “The thing that kept me going were the strong women in my life,” he said.

Despite his decision to publish a book, Mr. Ndesandjo said he remained fearful of losing his privacy. Before agreeing to an interview, he asked that questions be provided in advance and that they avoid politics and personal matters.

“He almost canceled five times,” said Harley Seyedin, a friend who runs the American Chamber of Commerce in South China and helped orchestrate publicity for the book. “He’s very, very sensitive. He’s also worried about offending Obama.”

Toward the end of the presidential race, Mr. Ndesandjo said, he had a nightmare about his half brother. A week later, at his wife’s prompting, he boarded a plane for the United States. The two men, he said, greeted each other with a long embrace and Mr. Ndesandjo gave him a scroll of calligraphy he had painted. It roughly translated as, “Even though we are far apart I feel close to you.” He said he planned to introduce the president to his new wife when he visits China this month.

After the interview, Mr. Ndesandjo strode down a crowded sidewalk, turning heads with his charcoal blazer, gold stud earring and Balinese scarf wrapped around his shaven head. A group of schoolgirls asked to take a photo with him. No one seemed to recognize him until a pair of Nigerian men asked if he was the American president’s half brother. “No half brothers,” he said. “He’s my brother.”

Trial in Chongqing, China, Reveals Vast Web of Corruption - NYTimes.com

Image by xiaming via Flickr

By ANDREW JACOBS

CHONGQING, China — Wen Qiang had a fondness for Louis Vuitton belts, fossilized dinosaur eggs and B-list pop stars. For a public employee in charge of the local judiciary, he also had a lot of money: nearly $3 million that investigators found buried beneath a fish pond.

But Mr. Wen’s lavish tastes were nothing compared with the carnal appetites of his sister-in-law, Xie Caiping, known as “the godmother of the Chongqing underworld.” Prosecutors say she ran 30 illegal casinos, including one across the street from the courthouse. She also employed 16 young men who, according to the state-run press, were exceedingly handsome and obliging.

In recent weeks, Ms. Xie, Mr. Wen and a cavalcade of ranking officials and lowbrow thugs have been players in a mass public trial that has exposed the unseemly relationships among gangsters, police officers and the sticky-fingered bureaucrats.

The spectacle involves more than 9,000 suspects, 50 public officials, a petulant billionaire and criminal organizations that dabbled in drug trafficking, illegal mining, and random acts of savagery, most notably the killing of a man for his unbearably loud karaoke voice.

But like all big corruption cases in China, this one is as much about politics as graft. The political machine in Chongqing, a province-size mega-city of 31 million people in the southwest, has been broken up by a new Communist Party boss, Bo Xilai, who is the son of a revolutionary party veteran and has his eye on higher office.

Mr. Bo, a former trade minister sent to Chongqing to burnish his managerial credentials, has conducted the crackdown in a way that appears devised to maximize national attention. The drawn-out nature of the trial and the release of lurid details of the criminal syndicate have given him a reputation as a leading corruption fighter, though the inquiry has yet to implicate any really high-ranking party officials.

So far six people have been sentenced to death. Ms. Xie got off relatively lightly, receiving an 18-year prison term on Tuesday.

How Mr. Bo’s performance is regarded by the party elite is a matter of speculation. There are some suggestions that his swagger, including boastful comments to the news media, strikes some fellow officials as excessive. Anticorruption campaigns by China’s one-party state are generally calibrated to show resolution in tackling venality, but also to reassure the public that whatever problems are uncovered are localized and effectively contained.

“These guys are all for fighting corruption, but they are a little alarmed by the way Bo Xilai has been going about it and building up his personality,” said Sidney Rittenberg, one of the few American citizens to join the Communist Party here and a confidant of Chinese leaders since 1944. “People I talk to say he’s getting too big for his britches.”

A so-called princeling whose father, Bo Yibo, was an economic planner and a onetime ally of the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, Mr. Bo, 60, is already a member of the Communist Party’s powerful Politburo. He is often talked about as a future top leader in Beijing, although in the party’s rigid hierarchy the No. 1 posts in the party and the government have already been assigned to other younger officials.

Recent statements by Mr. Bo suggest he understands the perils of drawing too much attention. Two weeks ago, he defended the crackdown, saying he was forced to act by the rampant violence and brazen criminality that had given this perpetually foggy city a reputation for lawlessness.

“The public gathered outside government offices and held up pictures of bloodshed,” he said. “The gangsters slashed people with knives just like butchers killing animals.”

In the three weeks since trials began, the crowds have continued to come, and their stories of bloodshed are indeed horrifying. They press outside the gates of the Fifth Intermediate Court, hoping to glimpse the orange-vested defendants who are paraded through the hearings.

Others desperately seek out reporters willing to hear tales of crimes unpunished. “The bandits used to live in the mountains; now they live in the Public Security Bureau,” said Zheng Yi, a vegetable wholesaler.

Unlike past sweeps that brought down crime bosses and their henchmen, the crackdown in Chongqing has yielded a number of wealthy businessmen and Communist Party officials, exposing the depth of corruption that has resulted from the mixing of state control and free-market economics in China.

Ko-lin Chin, who studies the intermingling of organized crime and government in China, said the line between legitimate business and illegal conduct had become increasingly blurred, although most official corruption involved bribery, not violence.

“As these gangs have become more powerful, their existence depends entirely on the cooperation and tolerance of the Communist Party,” said Mr. Chin, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers. “But when things get out of hand, as they did in Chongqing, the party can really go after these groups with a vengeance.”

Among those on trial this week is Li Qiang, a local legislator and billionaire who the authorities say owned a fleet of 1,000 cabs and 100 bus routes. So great was his power, they say, that he orchestrated a taxi strike last year that brought the city to a standstill. On trial with him are three government officials suspected of acting as his “protection umbrellas” in exchange for payments of about $100,000 each.

While Mr. Li stood in the dock, more than 200 people gathered outside in the rain, including women who said they were roughed up in October last year when they refused to vacate their homes for a redevelopment project. One of them, Wu Pinghui, 67, said 40 people were herded into a government-owned bus and dumped in the countryside. By the time they made it back, their homes were gone.

“We called 110,” she said, referring to the Chinese emergency number, “but the police said they couldn’t get involved in a government affair.”

Hong Guibi also came to the courthouse. She said the Communist Party chief of her village, enraged when she and her husband refused to give him part of their orchard, watched as thugs attacked the couple with cleavers. Ms. Hong, 47, was critically wounded, and her husband was killed. “The neighbors heard our screams, but they were afraid to do anything,” she said.

Although heartened that so many are being prosecuted, Ms. Hong is still waiting for someone to come after the village chief. “If I could just kneel down in front of Bo Xilai,” she said, “I’m sure he would solve my problem.”

Xiyun Yang contributed reporting.