eBook News

Perhaps it is familiarity breeds contempt, or maybe it is just familiarity breeds a giving break. Either way, we do know that students will work harder on their writing when they know that what they are writing is going to be read by more than just their teacher, their parent, or the student next to them. So as the school year is ending and you are thinking about what to do next year, think about having your students produce and publish their work and put it out to the world. Below are two articles about how teachers have gotten their students to activity publish their work either as books or magazines. If you want to try some book publishing yourself (or with your students), you might want to start with a tool like StoryBird (https://storybird.com/), there you can write your story, then have it published into their digital library, and if you really want to you can even buy a printed (soft- or hard-cover) copy of the book for your shelves - or the school library's collection. ...

I've always surprised about how it is so difficult to get starting integrating ebooks in schools or just to convince so many in the public to make to try reading from ebook devices. I've been working with ebooks for about 20 years, and I can remember when I attended the first International Etext Conference back in 1998, how I thought that in just a couple of years we will have ebook devices in the hands of the students. I'm constantly surprised at how long it has taken to get as far to where we are today, although I now know that a basic premise technology integration always takes longer than expected, and we were developing new and better tools all along. I see the integration issue though as one related to "shifting baseline". With shifting baseline people identify something as normal or standard based on what was true when they gained awareness. Shifting baseline was first discussed in terms of fishing catches, people only though about their catch compared...