eBook News

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...

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...

I realize how adaptable tablets and computers are and how much that they can do, but there are still reasons to use an eink device with your schools and textbooks. One big reason in the classroom would be battery life, that month on a charge ensures that the device will be working and then also if a students does stop it won't be all of them. For tablets, my worry about power would be for the teacher at the end of the day, if the students have been movie watching during lunch it could be quite possible for a good number of them to be it of charge by the end of the day. Then there is reading itself. There have been studies that have shown that reading with eink shows the same effects in the brain as reading from paper, but tablets are different, not necessarily bad, just different. Then too, that power issue come up again for extended reading, think an hour at a time. We want students to get into flow and close reading, and eink devices are good for that. Eink devices like the kindl...

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 ...

Whenever I do a talk about ebooks I pretty much always hear people saying that they don't feel that ebooks are the same, that you get something different from the look and feel of a paper printed book (and other things like the smell of a book). I agree with a lot of those things too, and I'm also sure that the feel and smell of the horse was different from the car, but both got people from place to place, but for the most part only one is really in use as standard transportation today. The difference between reading from a text is printed on paper and reading from etext on the ereader has now been solved, there is no difference. Researchers in Germany have found that there was no difference when scanning peoples brains as they read from paper than has a red from the and the reader. The the study analyzed differences in reading from different kinds of books digital ink tablet PC and printed paper. The reading behavior of the readers was analyzed through eye movement (eye tracki...