eBook News

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...

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...