eBook News

First and foremost I want to thank the Pew Internet project for collecting and disseminating information about ebooks and reading. I love the data itself, I just always want more.  Whenever I read articles about reading habits and devices, I always wonder not just about the devices (or no device) that people are reading from, but I also wonder about the people being questioned about how much that they read. I see statements like the "more than 8 in 10 Americans ages 16-29 read a book in the past year and 6 in 10 used their local public library" and it makes me think about other questions. I remember when I was at the Butterfly exhibit in Gainesville, and the docent mentioned that this was the second largest butterfly habitat in the world, well the next words that I said (and at least three others at the same time) was "what is the largest?" So when I see something that mentions that 8 out of 10 people read a book that year, I wonder "at...

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels.  I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support...

I got a new version of Office during a computer reset in my office and went right to using it. It was going along fine, till I wanted to use the Executive Summary tool to analyze some text and couldn't find the tool. In checking online, indeed it is to no longer be included with Office. This to me is an accessibility issue in development. As an educator when I have a student with special needs one of the first things that I try to do is get the textbook being used in a digital format. With digital there are many things that can be done, such as varying the print size to using text-to-speech. One thing that I have often also done is to use the summary tool to create differentiated versions of the text, from the basic facts summary, to summary and detail, to the whole chapter. Being able to quickly get a summary of a chapter is a great learning tool. I've contacted Microsoft to ask why it was removed and to see if there will be some way to have it as an add-on, but as yet have o...