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...

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...