eBook News

Ok, this is a bit off-topic, but I was just presenting about ebook accommodations at a science teacher convention and they wanted to know about some good "science books" that would work well for the classroom collection. I'm a strong believer of having classroom collections (real or virtual). There are lots of great books out there that people just don't realize. Too many people think of science books and then immediately go to the science textbook or some kind of field book (although those are great to have in the classroom too. If you are building a classroom collection for your high or middle school science classroom make sure to include a variety of books, not just non-fiction, but also picture books (think coffee table books), and fiction (that would include science fiction too). So here are some non-fiction books that I think are great to have in a collection.  Some great books on science that are not textbooks: The Science of Sci-Fi: From Warp Speed to Interste...

I've just been reading Clive Thompson's Smarter Than You Think and was on the passage about Total Recall and that made me think about how ebooks and related technologies are having the impact of remembering on me. I've been using LibraryThing for a while, and while initially it took a long time to get my print collection in, it isn't much of an effort to add a book or two a week. But now when I'm trying to remember something that I've read, I'll usually turn to my LibraryThing page to see if I can remember from the cover of the book where it came from, or as the books have been added (usually) my reading order, I can go back in time to see what I was remembering when - such as knowing I read it when I was visiting Denver. The point being is that my LibraryThing account is my Total Recall of what I'm reading. If I read a library book, it goes in the collection, if I read a free Kindle book, it goes in the collection, and if I listen to an audiobook, it g...

This sounds similar to a project that I had been working on with my own school's library. I love the idea of handing a student not just a single book, but a whole collection. I once attended a presentation done by another school who had done a similar project used audio books on iPods, you didn't just get one book, but a whole set. For ebook devices school libraries could create themed collections of books mixing in with the new books a whole set of public domain texts to that as the student used the ebook device to read that one that they wanted, they could also be exposed to other literature that they may not have seen before or that the library doesn't' have as a hard copy. For example, you could purchase the new movie tie-in for the latest of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and then add to the device other public domain ebooks such as Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, and Captain Blood. Or think about having the whole collection of a series on...