eBook News

Here is an interesting experiment that was done with ebooks, that would be very hard to do with print books and get good results. These publishers wanted to know if reading completion rates were the same for males and females. They added a bit of code, called candy.js, to the ebook that sent back information on the reader with the completion of each chapter the next time the reader device was online.  Then they found out that the completion rate was about the same for each gender. Instead, bigger issues for completion rates were things within the book like the writing style, characters, and topic were more influential on book completion. This trend held true across multiple genres including non-fiction, and literary fiction (including fantasy, science fiction, and crime). Now as a research tool this is very interesting, as it eliminates the self-survey issues that have been commonly used to interview people - either the book was read or not, and there is specific data to show it....

One of the things that I do love about my ebook devices, is their ability to carry so many books. Before during a holiday or work trip, I would be packing a number of books that I then had to cart around throughout the trip. Now instead, I just load up my Kindle, then turn on the Airline mode and I'm set till I get back home with plenty to read, and I'm usually able to make the whole trip on one charge. I often like to add books about where I'm going, along with other information. During my last trip I was in China, and I not only had my collection to read on the way there and back, I also (like a lot of others I saw) had something to read on the subway. As an extra I had downloaded the Beijing subway map as a PDF to my Kindle, and so I always had a map with me, that won't add more things that I have to carry.  So for those of you about to go on holiday break (winter in the northern hemisphere or summer in the southern), don't forget to load up your device for t...

Here is an interesting situation, a Renaissance Learning the people who make Accelerate Reader report titled What Kids are Reading found that just having struggling readers read for about five minutes a day resulted in measurable improvement. " found that roughly 200,000 of the 1.4 million fifth graders in its student database began the 2014-15 school year reading at a very low level, among the bottom quarter of fifth graders nationally. Most of them finished the school year in this unfortunate category. But 28 percent of these students somehow got out of the bottom quarter by year’s end. And a smaller subset of those students — five percent of the 200,000 — did something spectacular: in less than a year, they were reading as well as the top 50 percent of fifth graders." "it does know that these spectacular students read an average of 19 minutes a day on the software. By contrast, the kids who remained at the bottom read only 14.3 minutes a day. Over the course of ...

A couple of weeks ago I had "purchased" a Dr. Who comic book from Amazon (purchased, but free then).  And as I was trying out such a book on my Kindle to see how well it works (and it did work fine, although the zooming took a bit of practice). It made me think of a few things, first was that the comic book was based on the last three Doctors versus the "older" Doctors. I had watched one of the older shows from the 1960's just recently with Tom Baker and do enjoy the new ones Saturdays on BBC America. While thinking of the two and the involved plot points in the modern show reminded me of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. And I think that this show is another good example that the premise of that book is true. Things today are more complicated that those from that "Golden Age" of television. I think that Dr. Who is an excellent resource for comparison as it is a show ...

Booktrack  has become a Google for Education partner and is now offering a free Booktrack Classroom version for teachers.  With booktracks you are trying to engage students more with the text by adding sound effects, music and other forms of audio to the material they're reading. Research on the concept has found that adding a soundtrack to text being read can increase comprehension and encourage students to read for longer periods. Teachers register for their free account and add a class, student names, and student password options. With your account, teachers and students log in and access an online text library with public domain books and chapters, you can also upload your own stories. Once a story is loading, you can add an audio track, by choosing the text and then specifying music by emotion, genre and style or sound effects.  When reading, the reader can adjust the volume, speed (or let the system figure it out by page turnings), the text size, spacing and back...

This may illustrate what could (and most likely will) be the darkside of opensource digital textbooks. Any individual or small group could create a textbook and make it digitally available, but it could either be slanted to a certain view or not include information that an author disagreed with. Yes, teachers should be able to supplement information provided by the textbook to provide a better picture of the actual situation, but that too has issues. For many teachers, the textbook is the curriculum. For example, i n science classrooms, teachers have been known to rely heavily on textbooks (Driscoll, Moallem, Dick, & Kirby, 1994).     The textbook, often a critical part of developing the curriculum for a school, and has relegated the teacher to occupy more of a passive role in the planning process.   Historically, published curriculum materials, such as textbooks, have been the main component for teaching in the US (Goodlad, 1984).  These textbooks provided a...

Ok, schools out and perhaps you were planning on spending some time relaxing with a best seller.   Perhaps you were thinking on catching up with those from last year, or the ones just coming out for that great beach read. In 2014 that would include: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green  Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul by Jeff Kinney  Divergent by Veronica Roth  Insurgent by Veronica Roth  Killing Patton by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard  Allegiant by Veronica Roth  Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn  Frozen by Victoria Saxon But instead of just catching up with last year's reading, you might go back even further and read the best sellers from 100 years ago, those from 1915, with the added bonus that you can read them for free online or on your device. The Best Sellers of 1915 The Turmoil by Booth Tarkington - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1098 "The Turmoil", the first volume of Pulitzer Prize-winner Booth Tarkington's...