eBook News

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.

The process of taking notes, makes reading that much more of an active process and will aid in comprehension and retention. The addition of your own personal notes are usually easier to understand and remember than textbook material. As a student reads the textbook, he or she may not remember all of that they read when they have finished - this is especially true of very dense texts. But, if a student reads the information and also writes down notes about what he or she is reading at the same time, then that extra step reinforces that information and improves retention. So one of the best ways to retain information you are reading it is to take notes while you are actually reading it, for print books these notes were usually written in the margins of the text and so were called margin notes.  The taking of margin notes is a strategy that focuses your attention on important information from the textbook, novels, or articles that you are reading. Because it involves ...

This is the start of a short series on using ebooks and ebook readers as textbooks. Reading Aloud - using Text-to-Speech with your ebook.  Ebooks seem to be the new wave for textbooks. Already ebooks and book rentals have had a major impact on book sales at the college level and a number of states have already passed legislation or are working on legislation concerning changing the school textbook to be either more or fully digital. In my own state of Florida we already have legislation that will require schools to begin changing to digital textbooks by the 2015-2016 school year. Of course one of the driving pressures for this change is money, ad the US DOE expects that this kind of change could save approximately $60 per student per year - something that could be a nice summative savings (especially when you consider that my district has about 200,000 students = a savings of $12,000,000 from the yearly budget). And while this is all fine and good ...

The ongoing adaptation of art which "used" to include book and now will have ebook readers. Pierre Auguste Renoir's  Breakfast at Berneval reading iBooks with an iPad Wall painting from.Pompeii - Portrait of Menander  (c. 70 CE) reading from a Kindle Fire 

This kind of research doesn't surprise me. Instead it is just a reinforcement of things that I have found, students today are ready for the switch to digital textbooks. To me the hold is because of two factors. First is the paradigm shift necessary in faculty to change from paper based text to digital. This is also been shown in other research that found that students were much more aware of digital options for textbooks than faculty (other research also showed that faculty were unaware of the current pricing of the texts that they used).  Faculty need to start going beyond the book company rep that shows up with sample texts and start looking for themselves if they are also to start incorporating open source texts too. The second issue is systematic, until faculty start experiencing digital textbooks, they won't be using them with their students, and a desktop computer isn't the ideal for such use. We need faculty to start using devices like...

To me the idea digital textbook will most likely be a hybrid of the new pad devices and the e-ink readers. The iPad is a great device and able to run multiple ebook formats, it is highly intuitive in operation, and the touch color LCD display works great, but that said, at best you could get maybe a day's worth of battery life. The latest version of e-ink devices now runs for between two weeks and a month on a charge. So when students were just doing reading, taking notes from a book, etc, it would be better done with the low power option, and then switch to the more active display for other things. I just remember when I introduced a set of digital cameras for my students to use in my science class, even though I was using long lasting rechargeable batteries, I was amazed at how quickly students could drain them, often in just one class period. I think it is a great idea to start replacing textbooks with digital versions, such as could run on an iPad. For schools th...

Technology in and of itself is never the answer, instead I have usually found it to be about interaction and engagement with the content and the tools of learning. Yes, there may be some initial technology attraction that can help you push though the cognitive overload of learning with a new tool, but in the long run it is usually what you do in the learning that can really help. Here is where I think that ebook devices have the advantage over printed text, just that you can do things like interact with your textbook to highlight, bookmark, and take virtual "margin notes" (all things that you are not allowed to do with a school book). Educator: Classroom technology should be about student engagement The key reason to implement such technology as the iPad and iPod Touch in the classroom is student engagement, says Patrick McGee, the assistant principal of a Florida school. He says the technology can be used to increase productivity or involve students in activities that wer...

A good amount of news today that I'm catching up with. My thoughts about the following. I do wonder about the 26 time for a library book loan for Harper Collins, this returns to the concept of who owns a bought book. If I own the book how many times can I read it? They mention in their article about the checkout shelf life of a book for a year, but as a physical book collector, I have mass market paperbacks from the 1950's that are still readable and that I do read every now and then (although I've never actually counted how many times). I think that schools using Kindles and iPads as book tools are an excellent start on the process, yes there will be problems, but I feel that the possibilities that are offered with electronic text do make it worthwhile. And having been a middle and high school teacher for 17 years, I can also say that printed copies of books had their issues too. I know that many of my fellow teachers may have some issues as they start to use digital text...