Archive for the ‘E-Books’ Category

The folks at Educause have put together 7 Things You Should Know About E-Readers. This brief guide details the essentials about these portable devices such as:

1. What is it?
2. How does it work?
3. Who’s doing it?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Lifehacker has posted a guide to how to Turn Your Netbook into a Feature-Rich E-Book Reader. Check out this post to find helpful tips and tricks to set yourself up with a portable e-book reader including:

• Rotate The Screen
• Adjust The Screen Brightness
• Use a Special Power Saving Mode
• Setting Up E-Book Software

Richard Brooks at the Times Online reports that the British Library will offer over 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from its collection as free downloads this spring.

“Owners of the Amazon Kindle, an ebook reader device, will be able to view well known works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thousands of less famous authors.

The library’s ebook publishing project, funded by Microsoft, the computer giant, is the latest move in the mounting online battle over the future of books.”

Christina Warren at Mashable has compiled a list of 10 Must-Read eBooks for Social Media Lovers. Each list entry includes a brief synopsis, cover art, and format details. The World According to Twitter by David Pogue and Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith look particularly interesting.

Lifehacker authors Gina Trapani with Adam Pash have published The Complete Guide to Google Wave. This helpful e-book is a comprehensive user manual for all things Wave and is available for free in wiki format. Here’s the table of contents:

• Chapter 1: Meet Google Wave
• Chapter 2: Get Started with Wave
• Chapter 3: Manage Your Wave Contacts
• Chapter 4: Find and Organize Waves
• Chapter 5: Dive Deeper into Wave
• Chapter 6: Master Wave’s Interface
• Chapter 7: Wave Gadgets
• Chapter 8: Wave Bots
• Appendix A: What Wave Can’t Do
• Appendix B: Contribute to The Complete Guide to Google Wave

via WebWorkerDaily

Google has announced that it is making 1 million public domain books from Google Books available for free download in the EPUB format. “EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices”, so users will be able to view these books on their mobile devices. According to ReadWriteWeb, Google had previously made this massive EPUB collection available to partners Barnes & Noble and Sony, but never to users before last week’s announcement.

Jared Newman at PCWorld takes a look at the two hottest e-book readers on the market right now with Sony’s E-Reader vs. Kindle: 5 Reasons Amazon Should Worry. The article discusses five features that may make Sony’s E-Reader the device of choice for e-book fans including:

1. More Choice
2. Touch
3. It’s Cheaper
4. Open Format
5. Cool Features

via Matt Bolin

Josh Catone at Mashable suggests 3 Reasons Students Aren’t Ready for Digital Textbooks. And from his observations it seems that digital textbooks have some major hurdles to overcome before they’re ready for mass adoption such as:

• Cost Savings Must be Greater
• A Standard Format is Needed
• Questions of Ownership

Sam Dean at OStatic rounds up five free online books to help newbies get up to speed with OSS with 5 Free Online Open Source Books for Beginners. “They introduce basic concepts for getting started with Linux, Firefox, Blender (3D graphics and animation), GIMP (graphics), and the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications.”

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has made his latest 288-page book, Free, available on Scribd. Here’s the description:

“In his revolutionary bestseller, THE LONG TAIL, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in FREE he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, FREE is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company’s survival.”

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

Scribd, a document-sharing community of over 60 million readers, now offers the ability for users to upload and sell their written works through the website. The new Scribd Store offers e-books, research reports, how-to manuals, and even sheet music for sale by its users.

According to coverage by Brad Stone of the New York Times:

“In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.”

Lance Eaton, visiting lecturer of history, English, and interdisciplinary studies at Massachusetts-area colleges and universities, writes for Library Journal about Books Born Digital: The emerging phenomenon of books published first in digital format.

“It used to be that a book was published first as a hardcover, then as a lower-cost paperback. With increasingly tech-savvy consumers demanding instantaneous access to content in various formats, that publishing protocol has in the last decade changed to one in which the book in codex form often remains the focus, but digital “extras” like audio excerpts and e-chapters act as enticements toward the purchase of the hard copy. More recently, a new phenomenon has emerged, one in which a title comes first in digital form and then—if at all—in physical form.”

Amazon announced the Kindle DX today, a large-screen edition of their e-paper device which is available for pre-order at a price point of $489. Due to be available this summer, the new Kindle DX sports 2.5 times the surface area of the latest-generation Kindle, has native PDF support, and an impressive auto-rotate feature which changes the display from portrait to landscape as the user adjusts the device. Here are some other differences between the new Kindle DX and the Kindle.

• Bigger screen - 9.7″ diagonal e-ink screen (as opposed to the 6″ Kindle)
• Larger storage capacity - 4GB or room for 3,500 books, (double the 2GB of the Kindle which holds over 1,500 books)
• Native PDF support
• Auto-rotate display
• also…
  Heavier 18.9 ounces (vs. 10.2 ounces of the Kindle)

Higher ed textbook publishers will begin to offer their titles through the Kindle store, and several universities have partnered with Amazon to make the DX devices available to students this fall.

From the Business Wire press release:

“Kindle DX’s large display offers an enhanced reading experience with another category of graphic-rich content—textbooks. With complex images, tables, charts, graphs, and equations, textbooks look best on a large display. Leading textbook publishers Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley, together representing more than 60 percent of the U.S. higher education textbook market, will begin offering textbooks through the Kindle Store beginning this summer. Textbooks under the following brands will be available: Addison-Wesley, Allyn & Bacon, Benjamin Cummings, Longman & Prentice Hall (Pearson); Wadsworth, Brooks/Cole, Course Technology, Delmar, Heinle, Schirmer, South-Western (Cengage); and Wiley Higher Education.

Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College, and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia will launch trial programs to make Kindle DX devices available to students this fall. The schools will distribute hundreds of Kindle DX devices to students spread across a broad range of academic disciplines. In addition to reading on a considerably larger screen, students will be able to take advantage of popular Kindle features such as the ability to take notes and highlight, search across their library, look up words in a built-in dictionary, and carry all of their books in a lightweight device. ”

Steven Johnson writes about the future of the book for the Wall Street Journal in How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write. In this insightful article, the author poses that new devices such as the Kindle and iPhone are changing the way people read, buy, and write books. According to Johnson, books will become increasingly social and accessible, however this increased access may lead to dimished attention, books being written with search engine rankings in mind, and new distribution models such as paying per chapter.

“Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article — sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument…

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”

Athabasca University Press has published Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training and licensed it under a Creative Commons License. The entire e-book is available for download via the AU Press website.

“This collection is for anyone interested in the use of mobile technology for various distance learning applications. Readers will discover how to design learning materials for delivery on mobile technology and become familiar with the best practices of other educators, trainers, and researchers in the field, as well as the most recent initiatives in mobile learning research. Businesses and governments can learn how to deliver timely information to staff using mobile devices. Professors can use this book as a textbook for courses on distance education, mobile learning, and educational technology.”

via Reference Notes