eBook News

The ongoing adaptation of art which "used" to include books and now will have ebook devices. Perhaps not classic art, but changing a magazine ad from the early 1920s to include ebooks as gifts. This picture didn't actually have books in it, but the packages that were on the chair reminded me of the boxes my ebooks came in.  And of course not only people interact with books, pets to too. Frank Paton's 1880 painting Tearaway with an iPad showing a textbook.  John Henry Dolph's 1881 painting The Scholar on a Kobo

The ongoing adaptation of art which "used" to include books and now will have ebook devices. Amelia Jan Murray's Faries on a Book (1820s), now on a Kindle Oasis Ludwig Deutsch's The Scholars (1901) now with an iPad  Henry Lewis Stephens' untitled (1863) of a man reading a newspaper, now reading a Kindle Fire.

Last month had the Banned Books Week, and it made me think about all the good books that others don't want to exist. I agree that there are many books that I don't like, but just because I don't like them doesn't mean that there isn't someone who does like them. I always feel bad about disposing of a book, even one that I find in the road that has been run over a few times. But in case you missed it, there was a nice Humble Book Bundle of Forbidden reading ( https://www.humblebundle.com/books/forbidden-books-2018 )  and it is surprising how many banned books have ended up as commonly required reading lists.  So if you want to try some banned reading, you might go over to Project Gutenberg ( https://www.gutenberg.org/ ) to download a copy of a required but banned reading. And while it wasn't banned officially it would have had problems was Andy Weir's great book The Martian. So many teachers and students wanted to read it in class and discuss the wonde...

Back in 1997 Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle (in the style of R.A. Heinlein) wrote a "juvenile" science fiction series with the central characters being young adults. These books used real science as did the R.A. Heinlein ones. In one of the books, Higher Education, a large part of the focus on the education system. As part of that story the students in school didn't read their books, instead, they watched videos and had electronic readers read the books aloud to them. So it looks like to some extent we are now approaching that science fiction waypoint, as now less than half prefer to read a textbook versus watching a video of the content. This could also mean that we need to work harder to make the books more enjoyable and understandable. I can say that as a science teacher, especially when teaching in middle school, I and my students would become frustrated with our textbooks, as most science textbooks were written two grade levels above the grade that they were...