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 th...

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 ...

This is the start of a short series on using ebooks and ebook readers as textbooks. Reading Aloud - using Text-to-Speech with your ebook.  Ebooks seem to be the new wave for textbooks. Already ebooks and book rentals have had a major impact on book sales at the college level and a number of states have already passed legislation or are working on legislation concerning changing the school textbook to be either more or fully digital. In my own state of Florida we already have legislation that will require schools to begin changing to digital textbooks by the 2015-2016 school year. Of course one of the driving pressures for this change is money, ad the US DOE expects that this kind of change could save approximately $60 per student per year - something that could be a nice summative savings (especially when you consider that my district has about 200,000 students = a savings of $12,000,000 from the yearly budget). And while this is all fine and good ...

I'll admit that as I've switched from print to electronic reading, one of the things that I miss is browsing shelves to find new things to read. I do also admit that this was not always a successful strategy in finding something to read, best sellers could overcrowd the shelves, and then I would usually prowl the SiFi section and might never see something that would be good, but was out of current set of shelves that I was looking in.  But I do miss that nostalgic feeling that I used to get from going into new and used bookstores (I do still peruse used bookstores as I find them). Technology is still there to help though. When I feel like wondering through the stacks to find new books today, I will also turn to book browsing tools that can help me find new books and authors to read either in print or now with my ebooks. Now I'm a strong believer of letting students read what they like, yes we need to guide them to have a well rounded backgroun...

As someone who has lived either next to or in the Caribbean basin most of my life (and taught science), I'm well acquainted with the effects of storms as they occur and the power loss aftermath. Whenever my power has gone out for an extended period of time I've always loved that my book collection is still right there to entertain or to teach me. This is still one of the great things about my e-ink readers over my LCD readers (like my iPad). The fact that I can read for over a month on a charge will usually take me through any power problems that I'm dealing with and since I can still buy books with my Kindle using the cell tower network, means I'm not limited to books that I've already read. Even more though than the lack of power issue, I love my eink reader for when I travel. It used to be that I would have to pack a good number of books for a trip, once to read in the car or plane getting there and coming back, and some to read while relaxing at where ever ...

Here is something that I think that most might not have remembered or thought of when considering the online options for libraries. But just as schools today are considering online options for what to do when schools are closed due to weather or other issues, so too can community libraries still serve their public through online options even though their doors have to be closed, in this case due to a power outage. On one side, I hate to see any library closed for any reason, but do understand that it will happen from time to time. In Florida, we add days to the school calendar to ensure that we will have enough days to maintain accreditation even if we get a major storm. I don't want this to be considered a substitute for a public library, but instead more like the redundancy built into a good system. This way if one part isn't working another can take up some of the need. Here also is where users having a...