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...

Today's posting is a little different from the others, in that it's not related to a news article, but instead are some of my own personal observations dealing with an ebook aspect. I had a good amount of experience with a wide variety of read aloud systems including text-to-speech tools. For example, I often use text-to-speech tools when reading dissertations, this allows me to have a multimodality form of reading, improving my reading and I found this to be very effective. So with my Kindle I thought I would experiment with having it read to me a variety of different kinds of books and see what happened. For the past few weeks I've been having my Kindle read me a textbook that I'm using with one of my classes. I often listen to this textbook while I'm driving longer distances or riding my bike, and as lately I've been taking a number of trips that have me driving for about two to three hours each way it gave me a way to more effectively beyond just listening t...