eBook News

In mid-January PEW for the last few years has been running a survey to find out about people having an ereader or a tablet. To me it always looks like geometric growth, in other words, we have moved out of Chris Anderson's long tail concept and are now in the "mainstream," with ebooks and tablets. Over the last three years, each year the number of tablets in use have just about doubled, from 5% in 2010, to 10% in 2011, and now 19% in 2012. And ereaders are pretty much the same (10% in 2011 and 19% in 2012). I also think that when you put readers and tablets together it becomes even more impressive, as of January 2012 it is estimated at 29% of adults have either a tablet or a reader. Then of course there are people like me, who have multiples of each that we work and experiment with (although PEW never calls me). I know to many when they read numbers like 5%, they thought it was no big deal, it's a rarity, but that is hard to continue to say when numbers become somethi...

Today's posting is a little different from the others, in that it's not related to a news article, but instead are some of my own personal observations dealing with an ebook aspect. I had a good amount of experience with a wide variety of read aloud systems including text-to-speech tools. For example, I often use text-to-speech tools when reading dissertations, this allows me to have a multimodality form of reading, improving my reading and I found this to be very effective. So with my Kindle I thought I would experiment with having it read to me a variety of different kinds of books and see what happened. For the past few weeks I've been having my Kindle read me a textbook that I'm using with one of my classes. I often listen to this textbook while I'm driving longer distances or riding my bike, and as lately I've been taking a number of trips that have me driving for about two to three hours each way it gave me a way to more effectively beyond just listening t...

A couple of months ago, in analyzing purchasing trends, it was found that parents were purchasing more print books to digital. And I'm sure that when at a store, children will want that book that they can see. But I do worry about a parent's (or teacher's) preferred text format  being the one that they will force on children. After all today's children are growing into a different world than when I was young - they have different print options.  For me there was just the size and shape of the book, today there is the etext version, the ipad version, or the paper, and it could be that children might prefer the digital.  A recent report from Sesame Street's Joan Ganz Cooney Center ( http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/ ) found that kids prefer to ebooks over print books.  The "Quick Study" followed 24 families with children (3-6) through the summer and fall of 2011 and found that children reading ebook were retaining and comprehending just as much as when th...

I often hear from people that I teach, that they just don't have the tools at their own schools to implement technology like they want to. I usually then teach about the one to few computer classroom and strategies that will work in that situation and they discuss what they see as that day when they can provide true one-to-one computing for their students. My thoughts though are that we will most likely never need to provide the one-to-one computing for everyone, just the needed access. While we could wait to implement an ebook program where every student is provided the reader and the books, why wait. What about using what they student may already have in their bookbag or at home. Think instead about such a program as the transportation infrastructure. We could set it up so that everyone takes public transportation, we could, but we don't. Instead we usually set it up for a few situations. There are times when we would like a majority of the population to use public tran...

I understand that for many the addition of a new technology seems counter-intuitive as a cost savings device. But think about ebooks like hybrid cars, compact florescent lights. The hybrid car gets so much better gas mileage and that new energy efficient light will save electricity that you can end up saving money over time, not that you should run out and get a hybrid car or new bulbs, but if you were about to replace your car or lights it would be a good thing to look at. That is kind of how you have to start thinking about electronic books and devices. Yes, a good ebook device that will allow students to interact with the text, such as by highlighting, margin notes, bookmarks, and interactive dictionaries will cost close to $100, and if you are thinking about adding that as an extra it is a cost increase and once you multiple it by some number of students it can be a big cost. But, and this is a big but, what many people don't realize is how of...

I'm surprised at how many paintings that I'm finding of people with books. It just shows how much books are a part of our culture. In these two pictures the time frame is from1514 to 1850, over three hundred years, from when books were rare to when people started having their own large collections. While I love the ease of access and accessibly that ebooks provide to me, I do still love to browse a good bookstore and see what I can find. I sometimes wonder if we are at that time when milk delivery changed from being horse drawn to motor trucks. I remember one movie where the delivery person couldn't just give up his horse, so he had it walk with the truck, in the back instead of pulling. Are readers the new milk truck, which begs the question - Where are the milk trucks now? Carl Spitzweg (1850) - The Bookworm (with a Kindle Touch) Quentin Metsys (1514) - The Moneylender and His Wife (with an iRiverHD)

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels.  I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support...