eBook News

NASA has created another great ebook - this one is titled Spinoffs (a yearly publication), and features dozens of commercial technologies that were created or improved by NASA. The publication provides nearly 50 examples of how NASA benefits various industries and people around the world, from home gyms, pacemaker components, cleaning water and generating power. Print and digital versions of the latest issue and previous editions of Spinoff are available at: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2019/index.html   Spinoff  2019 Click here  to read online  (HTML) Download a copy of   Spinoff  2019  (PDF) Spinoff  2019 Summary Brochure  (PDF) Spinoff 2019 PowerPoint Presentation  (PPT) Spinoff  2019 is also available on the iPad!  Click here  to view the app in the iTunes store. It features shortened versions of all the articles from the book, image galleries, videos, and more. A 508-compliant PDF versio...

I do get so tired of seeing headlines like "Will Ebooks Ever Completely Replace Print?" I put such things up there with: Will Cars Ever Completely  Replace Horses? Will Microwaves Ever Completely Replace Stoves/Ovens? Will Color TV Ever Completely Replace Black & White? Will TV Ever Completely Replace Movie Theaters? Will Talkies Every Completely Replace Silent Movies? Will Cell/Smart Phones Ever Completely Replace Land Lines? Will Cloth Ever Completely Replace Animal Skins? Will Self-Driving Cars Completely Replace Standard Cars? I seriously doubt that anything ever gets completely replaced. I see it more like a half-life decay/reaction, things are changing and often by quite a bit, but in the end there is always a bit left of what you started with, it never seems to go to total change over. Horses still have jobs, black and white movies are still made, some people still use land lines, and some people still wear fur. With things like books, I think that...

A couple of weeks ago I had "purchased" a Dr. Who comic book from Amazon (purchased, but free then).  And as I was trying out such a book on my Kindle to see how well it works (and it did work fine, although the zooming took a bit of practice). It made me think of a few things, first was that the comic book was based on the last three Doctors versus the "older" Doctors. I had watched one of the older shows from the 1960's just recently with Tom Baker and do enjoy the new ones Saturdays on BBC America. While thinking of the two and the involved plot points in the modern show reminded me of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. And I think that this show is another good example that the premise of that book is true. Things today are more complicated that those from that "Golden Age" of television. I think that Dr. Who is an excellent resource for comparison as it is a show ...

This month (actually starting on July 1) Florida's Digital Learning Now Act went into place. This act requires schol districts to establish virtual instruction options, authorizes blended learning courses, adds new requirements for Florida Virtual School, requires fill & part-time school district virtuaion instruction, and requires an online learning course for high school graduation. But what does this have to do with ebooks you might ask? As an online teacher, I feel it has a lot to do. Using ebooks for my online classes has made things a lot easier for myself and my students. I don't have issues of them ordering and how long it takes for it to arrive (my worst case was for a student who ended up out of country when the course started and if he had had to wait for the printed version, it would have taken over a month for it to get there - the course would have been half over by then). If the general instruction of a class is delivered e...

I think that this is an exciting time in the area books, yes there can be  contention , but it is exciting none the less. On one hand we have Harper Collins restricting the number of times a book can be loaned, bringing  up the question of who owns the ebook file. On the other had we have organizations like eBook Fling, which is pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a library. There has always before been book sharing. I would read something and then lend it to a friend to read, or a student (and hope that I would get it back), and in the last condo that I lived at there was a small lending collection in the club house that anyone could take and give back to. Technology though has drastically improved the situation in many respects. Initially one of the complaints/issues with DRM and ebooks was the inability to share, now that that has been fixed, we are in essence seeing people create libraries all over the place, the technology has ...