eBook News

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...

In mid-January PEW for the last few years has been running a survey to find out about people having an ereader or a tablet. To me it always looks like geometric growth, in other words, we have moved out of Chris Anderson's long tail concept and are now in the "mainstream," with ebooks and tablets. Over the last three years, each year the number of tablets in use have just about doubled, from 5% in 2010, to 10% in 2011, and now 19% in 2012. And ereaders are pretty much the same (10% in 2011 and 19% in 2012). I also think that when you put readers and tablets together it becomes even more impressive, as of January 2012 it is estimated at 29% of adults have either a tablet or a reader. Then of course there are people like me, who have multiples of each that we work and experiment with (although PEW never calls me). I know to many when they read numbers like 5%, they thought it was no big deal, it's a rarity, but that is hard to continue to say when numbers become somethi...