eBook News

  Digital reading in schools, and how the pandemic has impacted it Resources exploring the impact of COVID-19 on edtech and how schools are adapting to ensure every reader has access to the right books – including getting the most out of government relief funding. (1/10/2022)   Here is an excerpt  from the report:  

Sir John Lavery's Miss Auras the red book (circa 1900)  reading a Kindle Paperwhite (waterproof)

 When looking at books and ebooks it is often like comparing apples and oranges and pineapples. Somethings are just too different. Take this study that also used ebooks with lots of bells and whistles.  For reading comprehension we just need text, even adding pictures may change the effect.  There is a similar issue when they use digital text that you can't go back and look at which makes it very different than a paper test. Then too there is the practice effect. I always wonder in these studies if they would change if they only used children that had extensive digital reading experience.  Anytime you give people a new medium that they have to work with it changes the system (try driving with someone new to stick shifting - the driving is the same, that shift makes a huge difference). I'm sure that the data analysis is good, but it is also backward-looking situational.    Studies: Physical books aid reading comprehension Children perform better on reading c...

 Perhaps there is only so much TV a person can stand or perhaps it is the restrictions that some put on themselves against going to stores for anything other than groceries, or perhaps some people know how printed books have been shown to be disease carriers  ( COVID can be found up to three days in printed books ), or maybe it is a mix, either way, libraries have seen a growth in ebook use.  The Northbrook library in Illinois published that they saw dramatic growth in their digital checkout, with a 308% increase in ebook checkouts and a 165% increase in digital audiobook downloads, compared to the same month in 2019.  The District of Columba Public Libraries saw a similar impact, with an increase in digital checkouts that was 37% higher as compared to the same month last year. In Ireland, the latest data on book patronage has shown that during the pandemic downloads of ebooks downloads have increased to 529,416 over the last nine months (2020), while the total for l...

I love to read (print, digital, and audio), and if you always have a book with you, then you can find some time to read. I'm also a strong believer in anchoring while reading.  I can remember listening to Chopin A La Moog when I was a teen while reading Journey to the Center of the Earth and Ira Leven's This Perfect Day, and sill today when I hear music from that album I remember those books. I also think that that kind of anchoring can be done with where you are reading. Of course, not your favorite reading place at home where you normally read, but when you are traveling. I am lucky that I can travel for work, I am a teacher and Fulbright Specialist, and my work has taken me so many interesting places. When I was younger one of the problems I had while traveling was brining enough books to read, since depending on where you go you might not be able to get more books. This wasn't a problem while traveling in my home country, but you might not be surprised that it is a bi...

Large print books have been found to be really helpful in so many ways. Below are some of the results of a study about large print. A problem with large print books (on paper) is that there are so few printed, many of the publishers still think of them for "older" readers. One solution for this though is if you or your school have ereaders to read the books you want, then use the settings or font functions of the ereader to change to a larger print. Please take the time to change from the default that you got with your ebook reader and try some different font, it can make an amazing difference with your reading. Researchers have found a correlation between large print books and assessment results. findings include: 61% of elementary school students said they remembered characters and plots better when reading large print books. 48% of high school students said they read more outside of school after experiencing large print books. Middle school students reported ...

NASA has created another great ebook - this one is titled Spinoffs (a yearly publication), and features dozens of commercial technologies that were created or improved by NASA. The publication provides nearly 50 examples of how NASA benefits various industries and people around the world, from home gyms, pacemaker components, cleaning water and generating power. Print and digital versions of the latest issue and previous editions of Spinoff are available at: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2019/index.html   Spinoff  2019 Click here  to read online  (HTML) Download a copy of   Spinoff  2019  (PDF) Spinoff  2019 Summary Brochure  (PDF) Spinoff 2019 PowerPoint Presentation  (PPT) Spinoff  2019 is also available on the iPad!  Click here  to view the app in the iTunes store. It features shortened versions of all the articles from the book, image galleries, videos, and more. A 508-compliant PDF versio...

NASA has released another gorgeous photo book titled Earth, appropriately about the Earth, full of great pictures and information - a great book by itself (think coffee table book) or as a resource for earth science classes. Get your digital versions for free. Kindle readers:  MOBI All other eBook readers:  EPUB PDF readers:  PDF Online reading: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/earth-book-2019   Hardcover ($53) from the GPO bookstore:  https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/earth-book https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/earth-book  

The ongoing adaptation of art which "used" to include books and now will have ebook devices. Perhaps not classic art, but changing a magazine ad from the early 1920s to include ebooks as gifts. This picture didn't actually have books in it, but the packages that were on the chair reminded me of the boxes my ebooks came in.  And of course not only people interact with books, pets to too. Frank Paton's 1880 painting Tearaway with an iPad showing a textbook.  John Henry Dolph's 1881 painting The Scholar on a Kobo

The ongoing adaptation of art which "used" to include books and now will have ebook devices. Amelia Jan Murray's Faries on a Book (1820s), now on a Kindle Oasis Ludwig Deutsch's The Scholars (1901) now with an iPad  Henry Lewis Stephens' untitled (1863) of a man reading a newspaper, now reading a Kindle Fire.

Ok, this has been an interesting kind of converse experiment, and an unintended one too. What had happened was this, I had a book that I had purchased, a paper printed book, that had been sitting on my shelf for quite a while that I started to read the other day. Now the resulting experience has been a surprise to me. I normally read over 100 books a year, but for at least the last four years none of the novels or other tradebooks that I've read has been on paper, instead they have all been through electronic means. Which does mean that I've become very comfortable with my ereader (usually my Kindle) as a method of reading.  And I know that more and more people are reading text from screens, but that includes things like google search results and email. Even my students have commented that once they start noticing much of what they read is on the screen, but for most of them pleasure reading is still something done with paper. As a proponent of differentiation I do try to get...

This last semester I was teaching a graduate technology and literacy course. As part of that course all my students were to do some action research. We did get some great results, for example  one student’s work on using refreshable braille display for elementary children which saw an improved fluency of 4-5 letters per minute over those just using embossed paper, and another student I was working with developed her project on guided writing, saw an overall writing increase of 50% in just a few weeks using Google Docs as a writing system tool. The one though that I wanted to talk about here though was one student who was doing his action research on himself, to try and get better at reading from an ebook. He does great with paper, but found that he had trouble focusing with reading with technology. In his final report he had a number of things that he found that are of interest: "During this process I learned that I read materials online a lot more then I originally thought. I...

Here is a great summer reading opportunity. It is for elementary teachers and student. If you are not an elementary teacher, but have an elementary school child or know an elementary teacher the program may be used by individual students or if a teacher or school participates they have an opportunity of earning free books, as well as a one year ebook subscription to over 140 books. Best of all the books have a strong science and math connection.  Children who read all 25 interactive ebooks will receive a free book! Teachers who organize the effort and submit passports for 10 or more children will receive one-year free access to all 140 Arbordale interactive ebooks and 5 books for their classroom.  If five or more teachers from the same school submit passports, the school earns 25 or more books and unlimited school-wide and home ebook access. Arbordale has a free program for children to read over the summer to avoid a summer slump. Their “Read around the World” summe...

Ok, here are not unexpected results from research, but it is still important to trust (or in this case expect) but verify. Books are books, be they ebooks, popup books or printed chapter books, and with books interaction helps, creates more engagement and motivation. What I'm hoping from this is also the research on the books without parent (or other person) interaction, then does having the book read itself help there. Reading to children is great, but not all adults do read to their children, and many children live in a text sparse environment.  Does the book reading aloud help those students with the lower vocabulary when there is no one to read to them? As for comprehension, the study also found that the "children with above-average vocabularies did well on the camouflage post-test regardless of whether the adult or the book read to them." But again, what about a non-read to group? Well ebook research continues. http://www.maryrvogt.com Kids with lower vo...

According to the survey results in the UK, students generally had positive responses about their etextbook experiences. The authors go on to state the differences and key factors that influenced the student's engagement included: training, integration into the curriculum and functionality. "Sixty-one percent of surveyed students said they used eTextbooks during their university studies. The majority of students borrowed one from the library (65 percent) or received one through their institution (55 percent), while 35 percent purchased a copy for themselves." "All participants own at least one portable digital device, most commonly a smartphone, followed by a laptop. More significantly, 89 percent take their devices to lectures. " The first Kindle, released in November 2007. What I'm taking from this are a few things. First, there is the integration of the tools that students are using already and prefer, such as their phone or other portable devi...

Teaching and traveling again this summer. This time to Kunming, China, with a stop off in Hong Kong. Ending up reading thirty books (including plane time) this trip and once again this was made easier by traveling with an ebook reader. Considering that the average paperback weighs between half and a pound, and the average hardback is about 1-1.5 pounds, that would have been a least an extra 20 pounds of books to carry, instead just carried a device that weighed less that one pound and fit in my pocket (and I can honestly tell you that the book stores in Kunming don't have books in English-nor did I expect them to).  One other great thing was I converted things that I needed, like maps of towns, subways, and other documents into PDFs, and then moved them into my e-reader, so that I always had them available that way, right in my pocket. Reading with the Big Buddha :-)

As a child who had print disabilities and did in fact need glasses, I can attest that I'm not surprised about this. While my own vision was good till about 6th grade, then I was involved in an accident that detached a retina and started deteriorating, giving me conflicting vision between my eyes, when in 7th grade led to failing spelling. Today, while the conflict is gone, I still use larger print as it is so much easier to read (than a size 10 or 12 font), which is a great thing about ebooks. I also now teach my own students about how they should check their students for things like both eyes tracking and convergence just by watching a student's eyes. Data show link between students' eyesight, academic performance Just 15 states require that preschool students be screened for vision problems, according to a report released today by the National Center for Children's Vision and Eye Health. Research has shown that vision problems can affect students' ac...

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...

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...

In a recent survey by LightSail Education of 475 educators about their school districts transition from paper to ebooks the following was found:  Concerning the migration to digital books embraced by school and district leaders: Fifty-two percent want students reading in digital books. Eight percent prefer paper books. Forty percent expressed no preference for digital or paper books. If you eliminate the no preference group, then for the two groups left ebooks are preferred 6.5 times more than print.  Of course this isn't addressing the issues of connectivity/access and prep. I do think that ebooks as textbooks are the way to go and I do so as much as possible in my own classes. But, many schools will subscribe to an etextbook service only to find out that the interactions and video are great, but when all the students try to access there isn't enough bandwidth to access, or they don't have enough computers or wireless connect...