eBook News

Today's posting is about Fonts - their color, size and shape. I am always surprised that people don't change their display to what works best for them in the situation that they are in. Many times dealing with people I've seen situations where they want the text to look in a way that makes it harder for them to read. For example a recent situation with a person who was having trouble reading from the screen. I did a basic change to the display size to 120%. She thought it looked great and was much easier to read, but when I explained what I had done, she changed it back to 100% - making it harder for her to read again as she wanted for it to look just how it was going to be when printed. I've seen this too with ebooks. Some people want it to have the same page appearance as their paperback books with the font using Times and the size being between 10 and 12 points. One of the great thing about ebooks is that you are not limited to the display being preset, instead you

It's just a few short weeks till the annual Read an eBook week (March 3-9). This will be the 11th year of the ebook celebration and I encourage everyone to participate (in Canada it is Ebook Month).  During that week there will be lots of free books from a variety of great resources- Visit  http://www.ebookweek.com/index.html for more information. As a side note, but one that leads well to the ebook week concept is that this year again I was judging at my regional science fair and noticed some developing trends. Over the last few year the reading science projects  included projects such as the can you read with jumbled letters, a wonder study on virus on book covers, and a neat programming project that analyzed text to figure out the author, but this year (2013) there were two studies on ebook devices and reading. One study focused on a single device, with the other used an online textbook, and both were looking at the reading results through assessment. While neither of the s

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks. Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text.  These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs. Poor highlighting design - too much text has been highlighted.  The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking ( to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be effective in highlighting it should be a kind of  meta