eBook News

Usually with reading textbooks people think about things like reading comprehension, where students are able to remember (recall) or understand the portions of the chapter being read. But textbooks also involve a different type of reading or literacy that of finding information within a passage - Searching. When searching, instead reading and understanding the entire text, the goal is to find a specific word, sentence, or information within a passage or chapter, or even an entire book. One of the big differences about reading ebooks is how it is possible to search within your text. In a print book when you are looking for something you have to skim and hope that you find the word that you were looking for. This can be a difficult process for some, as you may be trying to remember the location where you read it before (even harder if you haven't read that text yet) or if you have any kind of print disability then it can get even harder. You scan or skim to locate a single fact or...

This is based on the FCC's Digital Textbook Playbook and was created by OnlineCollege.org

Today's posting is about Fonts - their color, size and shape. I am always surprised that people don't change their display to what works best for them in the situation that they are in. Many times dealing with people I've seen situations where they want the text to look in a way that makes it harder for them to read. For example a recent situation with a person who was having trouble reading from the screen. I did a basic change to the display size to 120%. She thought it looked great and was much easier to read, but when I explained what I had done, she changed it back to 100% - making it harder for her to read again as she wanted for it to look just how it was going to be when printed. I've seen this too with ebooks. Some people want it to have the same page appearance as their paperback books with the font using Times and the size being between 10 and 12 points. One of the great thing about ebooks is that you are not limited to the display being preset, instead you...

It's just a few short weeks till the annual Read an eBook week (March 3-9). This will be the 11th year of the ebook celebration and I encourage everyone to participate (in Canada it is Ebook Month).  During that week there will be lots of free books from a variety of great resources- Visit  http://www.ebookweek.com/index.html for more information. As a side note, but one that leads well to the ebook week concept is that this year again I was judging at my regional science fair and noticed some developing trends. Over the last few year the reading science projects  included projects such as the can you read with jumbled letters, a wonder study on virus on book covers, and a neat programming project that analyzed text to figure out the author, but this year (2013) there were two studies on ebook devices and reading. One study focused on a single device, with the other used an online textbook, and both were looking at the reading results th...

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks. Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text.  These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs. Poor highlighting design - too much text has been highlighted.  The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking ( to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be ...

This is the start of a short series on using ebooks and ebook readers as textbooks. Reading Aloud - using Text-to-Speech with your ebook.  Ebooks seem to be the new wave for textbooks. Already ebooks and book rentals have had a major impact on book sales at the college level and a number of states have already passed legislation or are working on legislation concerning changing the school textbook to be either more or fully digital. In my own state of Florida we already have legislation that will require schools to begin changing to digital textbooks by the 2015-2016 school year. Of course one of the driving pressures for this change is money, ad the US DOE expects that this kind of change could save approximately $60 per student per year - something that could be a nice summative savings (especially when you consider that my district has about 200,000 students = a savings of $12,000,000 from the yearly budget). And while this is all fine and good ...

I'll admit that as I've switched from print to electronic reading, one of the things that I miss is browsing shelves to find new things to read. I do also admit that this was not always a successful strategy in finding something to read, best sellers could overcrowd the shelves, and then I would usually prowl the SiFi section and might never see something that would be good, but was out of current set of shelves that I was looking in.  But I do miss that nostalgic feeling that I used to get from going into new and used bookstores (I do still peruse used bookstores as I find them). Technology is still there to help though. When I feel like wondering through the stacks to find new books today, I will also turn to book browsing tools that can help me find new books and authors to read either in print or now with my ebooks. Now I'm a strong believer of letting students read what they like, yes we need to guide them to have a well rounded backgroun...