Electronic Book, e-Book, eBook, eJournals, and Electronic Journal Watch 

Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Electronic Books or eBooks are books that can be downloaded from the Internet into special reading devices that cannot be printed, photocopied, printed on paper, or copied in whole or in part to computer files.  Since they are the highest form of copyright protection, publishers are interested in creating public interest in such books. 

This document contains some threaded messages on eBooks that I wrote in various editions of New Bookmarks.

Bob Jensen's link to free online textbooks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

Bob Jensen's Education Technology Workshop --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/EdTech/

Custom Publishing 

2008 Updates (including college initiatives to publish electronic versions of books for students)

2007 Updates (including updates on Amazon's Kindle and the Sony Reader)

New Technologies for Electronic Reading 

London's famous Old Vic Theatre?  

Failed Ventures 

Electronic Book Trends on College Campuses

The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World 
(including "The Next Chapter on Electronic Books" in April 2004)

Searching for Audio and Video Clips, Lectures, Interviews, Speeches and Electronic Books --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#Audio 

How to Find Electronic Books and Electronic Journals

Problems in Marketing Electronic Books 

Campus Bookstore Options

Electronic Libraries

Top 20 eBooks  

May 19, 2000 netLibrary Electronic Books

January 8, 2000 Barnes & Noble will pay authors a 35% royalty!

July 30, 1999 (A Special Review) 

Historical Timeline of Book Publishing

Microsoft Electronic Book Software

Microsoft ClearType Overview

Barnes & Noble Deal With Microsoft Corporation

Rocket e-Book

Softbook Electronic Tablet

Everybook (now N-Vision Technologies)

Adobe Electronic Books

Palm to Distribute eBooks

Bookstore Operator to Offer Adobe e-Book Guides

Cytale

Online Electronic Textbooks (They differ from eBooks.)

WizeUp Electronic Textbooks 

Rovia Electronic Books

e Ink Emerges

An Article by Teri Folks --- "How to Teach Accounting With E-Books"

Electronic Books Are Not Popular With Every Reader

Why Not Publish Your Own Books (Award Winning Authors) 

My Earlier Succession of Messages About Electronic Books

April 18, 1999

July 30, 1999 (A Special Review)

August 11, 1999

September 21, 1999

September 28, 1999

October 12, 1999

January 11, 2000 (Microsoft)

April 11, 2000 (About Stephen King's eBook Sales of Over a Half Million Copies) 

May 15, 2000 (WizeUp Electronic Textbooks) (with subsequent update messages)

May 15, 2000 (Richard Campbell)

June 8, 2000 The Genesis Modification by Peter Kruger 

September 25, 2000 (Zip Publishing)

January 18, 2001 (PDF document management application tool called DocAble (From Everybook))

January 29, 2001 (New Adobe Electronic Books)

March 1, 2001 Illustration of Adobe's DigitalGoods

January 17, 2002 Message from Barnes & Noble 

April 22, 2002 Message on Audio Books

Time Warner Announces iPublish.com

Bookreporter.com e-Book Reviews

"Next Chapter for E-Books," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, April 9, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/09/suny

That great new book is timed for release this summer, and you’d love to have it on your syllabus for the fall semester. But like many a high-demand scholarly book, the one you have your eye on is being released only in hardcover. If you’re willing to spring for (and have your students pay) the full hardcover price, you can choose to buy now or, in some cases, make an electronic version of the book through a service like NetLibrary.

More likely, though, you’re going to decide to wait the year or more until the paperback edition comes out, bringing the price down into a reasonable range for students.

The State University of New York Press hopes its new “Direct Text” program provides another alternative for the college faculty member and her students. Under the program, which was announced Tuesday, the press will simultaneously make available, for $20, electronic copies of front-list books that are released only in hardcover. Professors, students or others have several options: They can download or print copies of the book, or they can gain online access to it for 180 days. About 20 such titles are available now, and the press expects 100-plus books to be available in this format each year, many in its core fields of philosophy, political science and Asian studies.

“In the past, a professor may not or probably would not have been able to assign that book until it came out in paperback,” said Dan Flynn, marketing director for SUNY Press, adding that oftentimes, by then, the content of some scholarly books has lost currency. “This approach takes those books, which are important as a teaching tool for their students, and makes it an affordable purchase for them.”

Flynn said SUNY believed it to be the first press making hardcover-only, front-list titles available simultaneously in a lower-cost electronic form. Alex Gendler, founder and president of Publishers Row, the company whose software undergirds the Direct Text program, said that while Hebrew University’s Magnus Press was using a similar technology, he too believed SUNY was the first American press to take such an approach.

Flynn and Gendler noted that many presses want to keep publishing hardcover books so that they can be sold to libraries — an important source of income — but need to find ways of making the titles affordable to students for use in courses.

SUNY Press’s latest effort, Flynn said, shows that the press is “continuing to adjust to the new paradigm of publishing. Really what this is about, first and foremost, is giving the purchaser of the book what they want in an affordable way. We’re trying to make it available, make it affordable, and make it accessible.”

By mid-day Tuesday, within hours of launching the new program, the press had its first sale: David Janssens’s Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophesy and Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought.

Jensen Comment
I viewed an Excel spreadsheet of the current listings in SUNY's DirectText program. They're pretty much low volume books where the publisher is probably more thankful for any added revenues from the book vis-a-vis mainline textbooks like we see in accounting, finance, and business courses. There might be some reading supplements in a few courses such as business ethics. Fortunately our major textbook publishers are increasingly offering electronic versions themselves. However, the price is much higher than $20 per password. 

Students that can afford it may well want to order a package deal of both the hard copy and the electronic versions. The reason is that hardcopy is preferred for reading and scanning (even by me) and that electronic versions are better for word searches, bookmarks, and hot links that take you to amazing Websites (like mine, ha ha). Thus far, however, I find that basic textbook authors in accounting don't provide much evidence that they are knowledgeable Web surfers.

At a minimum financial accounting and AIS textbooks should provide links such as the following links:

• TryXBRL --- http://www.tryxbrl.org/
   

• SEC Financial Explorer --- http://209.234.225.154/viewer/home/

2007 Updates

Read This First
Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0 --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle

Then watch this video --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKUKQ7QqOHw
Other Videos

• Introduction to Kindle --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi2q5gTlu6o
• Amazon Kindle - More Details - Part 1 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct0yPJqBzzA
• Amazon Kindle - More Details - Part 2 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StFq6QHNFSg
• Amazon Kindle - More Details - Part 3 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmT6TsWfVAU

$399 Amazon Kindle --- Click Here

Read This Next
The Future of Reading (beyond mere hard copy and electronic books as we know them)
"Amazon's Jeff Bezos already built a better bookstore. Now he believes he can improve upon one of humankind's most divine creations: the book itself.," Newsweek Cover Story, November 26, 2007 --- http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983

"Technology," computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, "is anything that was invented after you were born." So it's not surprising, when making mental lists of the most whiz-bangy technological creations in our lives, that we may overlook an object that is superbly designed, wickedly functional, infinitely useful and beloved more passionately than any gadget in a Best Buy: the book. It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can't be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.

"The book," says Jeff Bezos, 43, the CEO of Internet commerce giant Amazon.com, "just turns out to be an incredible device." Then he uncorks one of his trademark laughs.

Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos. When he sought to make his mark in the nascent days of the Web, he chose to open an online store for books, a decision that led to billionaire status for him, dotcom glory for his company and countless hours wasted by authors checking their Amazon sales ratings. But as much as Bezos loves books professionally and personally—he's a big reader, and his wife is a novelist—he also understands that the surge of technology will engulf all media. "Books are the last bastion of analog," he says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We're in the former VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world's largest virtual store. "Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn't." Yet. This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0. That's shorthand for a revolution (already in progress) that will change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish. The Kindle represents a milestone in a time of transition, when a challenged publishing industry is competing with television, Guitar Hero and time burned on the BlackBerry; literary critics are bemoaning a possible demise of print culture, and Norman Mailer's recent death underlined the dearth of novelists who cast giant shadows. On the other hand, there are vibrant pockets of book lovers on the Internet who are waiting for a chance to refurbish the dusty halls of literacy.

As well placed as Amazon was to jump into this scrum and maybe move things forward, it was not something the company took lightly. After all, this is the book we're talking about. "If you're going to do something like this, you have to be as good as the book in a lot of respects," says Bezos. "But we also have to look for things that ordinary books can't do." Bounding to a whiteboard in the conference room, he ticks off a number of attributes that a book-reading device—yet another computer-powered gadget in an ever more crowded backpack full of them—must have. First, it must project an aura of bookishness; it should be less of a whizzy gizmo than an austere vessel of culture. Therefore the Kindle (named to evoke the crackling ignition of knowledge) has the dimensions of a paperback, with a tapering of its width that emulates the bulge toward a book's binding. It weighs but 10.3 ounces, and unlike a laptop computer it does not run hot or make intrusive beeps. A reading device must be sharp and durable, Bezos says, and with the use of E Ink, a breakthrough technology of several years ago that mimes the clarity of a printed book, the Kindle's six-inch screen posts readable pages. The battery has to last for a while, he adds, since there's nothing sadder than a book you can't read because of electile dysfunction. (The Kindle gets as many as 30 hours of reading on a charge, and recharges in two hours.) And, to soothe the anxieties of print-culture stalwarts, in sleep mode the Kindle displays retro images of ancient texts, early printing presses and beloved authors like Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen.

But then comes the features that your mom's copy of "Gone With the Wind" can't match. E-book devices like the Kindle allow you to change the font size: aging baby boomers will appreciate that every book can instantly be a large-type edition. The handheld device can also hold several shelves' worth of books: 200 of them onboard, hundreds more on a memory card and a limitless amount in virtual library stacks maintained by Amazon. Also, the Kindle allows you to search within the book for a phrase or name.

Some of those features have been available on previous e-book devices, notably the Sony Reader. The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via a system called Whispernet. (It's based on the EVDO broadband service offered by cell-phone carriers, allowing it to work anywhere, not just Wi-Fi hotspots.) As a result, says Bezos, "This isn't a device, it's a service."

Specifically, it's an extension of the familiar Amazon store (where, of course, Kindles will be sold). Amazon has designed the Kindle to operate totally independent of a computer: you can use it to go to the store, browse for books, check out your personalized recommendations, and read reader reviews and post new ones, tapping out the words on a thumb-friendly keyboard. Buying a book with a Kindle is a one-touch process. And once you buy, the Kindle does its neatest trick: it downloads the book and installs it in your library, ready to be devoured. "The vision is that you should be able to get any book—not just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print—on this device in less than a minute," says Bezos.

Amazon has worked hard to get publishers to step up efforts to release digital versions of new books and backlists, and more than 88,000 will be on sale at the Kindle store on launch. (Though Bezos won't get terribly specific, Amazon itself is also involved in scanning books, many of which it captured as part of its groundbreaking Search Inside the Book program. But most are done by the publishers themselves, at a cost of about $200 for each book converted to digital. New titles routinely go through the process, but many backlist titles are still waiting. "It's a real chokepoint," says Penguin CEO David Shanks.) Amazon prices Kindle editions of New York Times best sellers and new releases in hardback at $9.99. The first chapter of almost any book is available as a free sample.

The Kindle is not just for books. Via the Amazon store, you can subscribe to newspapers (the Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Le Monde) and magazines (The Atlantic). When issues go to press, the virtual publications are automatically beamed into your Kindle. (It's much closer to a virtual newsboy tossing the publication on your doorstep than accessing the contents a piece at a time on the Web.) You can also subscribe to selected blogs, which cost either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog.

Continued in article

"Review: Amazon Reader Needs More Juice," by Peter Svensson, PhysOrg, November 21, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news114878393.html

Business Week's review --- Click Here

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic literature are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm 

November 21, 2007 reply from Amy Dunbar [Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]

Here’s a Chronicle of Higher Education link on e-book readers.

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2560/between-the-lines-of-a-new-e-book-reader?at 

Amy Dunbar

November 22, 2007 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Amy,

The first electronic book reader I ever purchased was the Rocket eBook in July 1999 --- http://snipurl.com/rocketebooklibrary  I plugged it into my desktop computer and downloaded mostly free books, but it was also possible to purchase new books and download them into the reader.

The reader held about thirty books. I found it the most useful on very long flights such as flights to Asia. At home I didn’t use it much, and now I’d have to really hunt just to find the reader and charger. I tend to read downloaded books on my laptop rather than my Rocket eBook. Some of the reasons are mentioned below.

My Rocket eBook weighed well over a pound mostly because the battery weight. But the weight really did not bother me as much as critics are finding fault with Amazon’s new Kindle weighing about ten ounces. My reader would not display color and did a poor job with graphics because of low resolution and screen size.

I do not yet have either of the two new state-of-the-art eBook readers --- the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle. You can read more about these and other earlier versions of electronic book readers (many of which are now history) at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

Do critics miss the main point? It’s hard to predict the future of eBook readers. Certainly the Amazon Kindle stands the best chance to date because it will have the largest library to choose from. I think the critics of eBook readers miss the main point. They tend to dwell on such matters as weight and used book markets. The Amazon Kindle weighs not much more and in many cases less than hardcover books. I’d rather pay less for a new electronic book than pay more for traditional book and worry about selling it later on.

Battery life is a problem, but serious users can purchase spare batteries.

The main point overlooked by critics is competition. Customers already have video-playing laptop computers with larger screens, gigabytes of hard drive, and screen capture capabilities from great software like Snag It. Increasingly new releases of books can be downloaded in PDF format. Most textbook publishers now offer electronic versions for laptop and desktop computers.

Google and Microsoft are now putting hundreds of millions of books free online from the major libraries of the world. For example, it astounds me how much is already available for downloading free of charge --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm 

Since so much new and old literature is available (fee and free) for our laptops, selling alternative electronic book readers (eBooks) is a hard sell from get go. Most of us already carry laptops on airplanes. Why burden ourselves with other reading devices (actually I mostly read paper back books and journal article photocopies while in flight)?

Electronic book readers (eBooks) would be almost as common as cell phones if they were the only alternative for downloading new and old electronic literature. But they’re not the only alternative except for very new releases from some publishers who refuse to allow electronic versions in PDF format for laptop downloading. Some, but certainly not all, of those publishers will allow eBook downloading since copying from eBooks is virtually impossible (while hardcopy can be photocopied and transcribed).

I would not invest in companies forging ahead in eBooks. If any company stands a chance, however, it will be Amazon. Amazon stands the best chance of building the largest library of electronic literature that cannot be downloaded into anything other than eBooks. But I’m not crazed by purchasing the newest of the new releases. If necessary I browse in the downtown or university library and check out the latest and greatest new editions.

I am crazed with reading latest news on some Websites like those of selected newspapers and magazines. I scan my favorites every day. Many of these sites allow free reading of today’s news and charge for older editions. So I scan today’s news like crazy and copy excerpts into my computer while the reading is still free. For example, I will scan today’s New York Times and copy what interests me into my computer before downloadings of articles are no longer free (actually the NYT just made archives free but this is not yet common for other newspapers and magazines).

I thus have two choices. I can read today’s newspapers on my laptop or my eBook. For my laptop, hundreds of newspapers are available each morning, and I can cut and paste items of interest into my own files. Only a few newspapers are available for my eBook, and I can’t copy anything from my eBook into my computer files. The choice for me is a no-brainer, and I think the critics of eBooks miss this main point. It’s legal to copy entire articles into my laptop for personal use just like it is legal to copy entire television shows and movies into my VCR. It’s not legal for me to distribute my entire copies to the world, but I can distribute excerpts like I often distribute quotations in my newsletters/blogs. I could not easily do this if I downloaded literature into my eBook rather than my laptop.

Hence critics miss the point about why I prefer downloading into my laptop as opposed to my eBook. I, for one, am not rushing out to “Kindle” my library.

Bob Jensen

November 29, 2007 reply from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU]

Walt Mossberg gave a failing grade today on Amazon’s ebook reader (“Kindle”) because of poor design.

I do not like its specs because of one other significant issue – it does not allow books in Acrobat pdf format.

I also do not like the ebook format Amazon has for downloadable format which also is not pdf. This format does allow image resizing, but only to a very limited amount.

I downloaded an ebook from Amazon - “Excel 2007 Pivottables” (Wiley) - and also bought the hard copy of the book. Some of the images in the book are difficult to read. One major advantage of the Adobe Reader over the Amazon reader is the ability to magnify images to very large size.

However, publishers are not using the full capacity of the Adobe Reader, in that it is possible to play multimedia within the Adobe Reader.

I’ll put a demo up on my site later next month on how to import Camtasia movies into an Acrobat file.

Richard

Richard J. Campbell
School of Business
218 N. College Ave.
University of Rio Grande
Rio Grande, OH 45674
Voice:740-245-7288
http://faculty.rio.edu/campbell 

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos announced the launch of an e-book device called Kindle. It weighs 10.3 ounces, costs $399 and can be used without a computer, offering instead a free, high-speed wireless data network from Sprint. Users can download books in less than 60 seconds, as well as newspapers, magazines and blogs (for a fee). The device uses an eye-friendly screen and lets readers increase the type size as needed. Will it be a hit, even though most other e-book efforts have been unsuccessful? We asked marketing professor Peter Fader, Don Huesman, senior director of information technology, and management professor Dan Raff to give us their reviews.
University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, Knowledge@Wharton, December 2007 ---
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm;jsessionid=a830205f4372372944c1?articleid=1851

"E-books, slow to catch on in mainstream, are a hit in niches," MIT's Technology Review, December 4, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/19820/?nlid=734

For a decade now, publishers have been hoping to wean readers off books and move them to electronic versions, which are much cheaper to produce and distribute.

It just hasn't happened, even with the support of an electronics giant like Sony, which put out a dedicated e-book reader last year. Amazon.com Inc. recently followed up with its own reader.

But if you look away from the mainstream publishing industry, e-books are already a success in a few niches, where they are giving rise to new ways of doing business. The standout example is role-playing games, but buyers of college textbooks and even romance novels are warming to e-books.

Witness Gareth-Michael Skarka, a representative of one of our newest professions: the e-book publisher. ''E-book publishers'' that reformat printed books into electronic formats have been around for a while, but Skarka commissions, edits and sells books that overwhelmingly never see print, and would never have existed if it weren't for electronic publishing.

''Most of our customers are fairly comfortable with the electronic format,'' said Skarka. He pulls in around $50,000 a year in sales, enough to make a living of it in Lawrence, Kan., where he is based.

The 156 e-books in Portable Document Format, or PDF, sold by Skarka's Adamant Entertainment aren't exactly highbrow literature. With titles like ''Slavers of Mars,'' and ''One Million Magic Items,'' they're aimed at people who play role-playing games -- the most famous of which would be ''Dungeons & Dragons.'' Skarka's prices are mostly less than $10, but the e-books aren't hugely cheaper than printed books, because most of the PDFs are short.

Role-players buy lots of books, which contain rules for their games or expand on the imaginary worlds in which they are set. It's fiction, but it's more like reference material than the kind of long narratives you'd find in novels. Industry insiders see that as a big reason PDFs work for role-players.

''In general, it's not the 300-page prose novels that people want to read on the screen,'' said Steve Wieck, who co-founded one of the most successful publishers of role-playing games, Atlanta-based White Wolf Inc., in the early 90s.

Wieck started noticing that a lot of White Wolf's releases would be scanned by fans and pirated online. Following a ''can't beat 'em -- join 'em'' strategy, he and his brother started DriveThruRPG.com in 2004 to sell PDFs, gathering books from many publishers, including Adamant Entertainment.

Wieck and Skarka estimate that e-book sales make up 10 percent of the $25 million in annual RPG sales. DriveThruRPG alone does $2 million in business annually. By comparison, the Association of American publishers put 2006 e-book sales at $54 million, 0.02 percent of total book sales of $24.2 billion.

Marc Zuckerman, a role-player in Rockville Centre, N.Y., bought his first e-book six months ago, even though he already has, or at least may have, a print copy of the book. His copy of the superhero game ''Villains and Vigilantes'' got lost in a move. Originally published in 1982, it's long out of print but available on DriveThruRPG.

''It's really nifty to be able to walk into a gaming session and plug in my laptop and everything is there, as opposed to lugging 40 books,'' Zuckerman said.

Look for a Year of E-Textbooks in 2008
Over the past year, a consortium of major textbook publishers and several competing ventures have been getting ready for a new push in what is becoming a small but steadily growing fraction of the overall market for college students. “Those efforts are starting to crack the surface of digital content being a serious growing enterprise in higher education,” said Evan Schnittman, vice president of business development and rights for Oxford University Press’s academic and U.S. divisions. McGraw-Hill Education, for example, offers almost 95 percent of its textbooks as e-books, and the publisher has seen a steady growth in interest over the past several years, albeit from a small base. Their logic seems unassailable: With laptops now an ubiquitous presence on college campuses and textbook prices ever on the rise and suddenly a hot issue, technologically inclined students seem poised to change their study habits — and save a lot of money — by forgoing scribbles in the margin and trading in their highlighters for cursors.
"E-Textbooks — for Real This Time?" Inside Higher Ed, January 3, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/03/ebooks 

Bob Jensen's links to free online textbooks and other electronic literature --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

"Yale University Press Goes the E-Book Route:  Google Plans Searchable Text in Images Searching Library Collections in Facebook," by Josh Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2644&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en 

Yale University Press Goes the E-Book Route Yale University Press is relying on a new piece of software to make its titles more widely available. The program, CoreSource, interfaces with Microsoft's Live Search Books program. The idea is that the press will be able to digitize more of its books and potential buyers will be able to find them through Live Search Books. If motivated by the text, users can become buyers through print-on-demand programs.

Microsoft's Live Search Books Program is part of Windows Live --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Search_Books

Bob Jensen's links to free online textbooks and other electronic literature --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Electronic Book Readers Updates

See above for the updated 2007 module on Amazon's Kindle!

Making Digital Books Into Page Turners
Despite tepid response to its Reader, Sony sees potential in the market--and Amazon may agree

Nearly 10 Months After its debut, the Sony Reader is hardly a game changer. Reviews of the tiny handheld book-reading device have been tepid at best, and Sony Corp. has consistently declined to release sales figures, which just might tell you something. But Sony isn't backing away. In fact, as speculation continues in publishing circles that book e-tailing giant Amazon.com is planning to come out with its own portable reader, Sony is launching a number of initiatives to give its Reader more sizzle. The market for digital books is nascent, and Sony, despite the Reader's less-than-splashy debut, still sees its potential, believing people will eventually warm to reading on a flat screen everything from books to the magazine you're holding now. The half-inch-thick Sony Reader, which can store about 80 electronic books, allows readers to flip pages and adjust the type size. It sells for about $300, and digital book downloads range from $2 to $20 apiece.
Business Week, September 3, 2007 --- http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_36/b4048065.htm?link_position=link9

Sony Portable Reader System --- Click Here

There are millions of books, poems, and related electronic literature now available, or soon to be available, free to read on your PC --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Question
What made the old Sony Walkman better than all new "audiobooks" for the blind?

As a library trying to implement digital audiobooks for our patrons, the dreadful state of player technology presents us with a serious obstacle ("Getting an Earful of Printed Words -- Downloads, Small Devices Draw a Wider Audience of Audiobook Listeners," Personal Journal, Sept. 28). The nearly 30-year-old Sony Walkman is easy to grasp and can be used by anyone with about 10 seconds of training. The controls can be manipulated with ease in the dark or by a blind person. It is cheap, reliable and has a consistent form factor. But the new, portable digital media players, regardless of price and maker, suffer from overengineering, and their features are focused on the music customer, ignoring the needs of the audio book user. None of the new devices can be used by the blind or visually impaired because the controls have no tactile feedback, are multifunction and ridiculously small. The displays, when they exist, are too small even for people with good eyesight. The process of downloading the book, transferring it to the device and then trying to keep your place while "reading" over a series of hours, days or weeks is daunting to the best and impossible for many. Many users give up after trying it once or twice.
Vern Mastel, "New Audiobook Technology Frustrates Blind Listeners," The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2006 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116017662453985426.html?mod=todays_us_opinion

Bob Jensen's threads on "Technology Aids for the Handicapped and Learning Challenged" are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped

"Review: Sony's Reader a step forward," PhysOrg, September 27, 2006 --- http://physorg.com/news78593741.html

Sure, there are electronic books available for download at Amazon and elsewhere, but they haven't really caught on. Sony Corp. is now tackling part of the problem with the U.S. launch of the first e-book reader that imitates the look of paper by using an innovative screen technology.

Is this the iPod for books? Not quite. But it is a step forward.

The Sony Reader is a handsome affair the size of a paperback book, but only a third of an inch thick. It goes on sale for $350 on Sony's Web site Wednesday, and in Borders stores in October.

The 6-inch screen can be taken for a monochrome liquid-crystal display at first glance, but on closer inspection looks like no other electronic display. It's behind a thin pane of glass, but unlike an LCD it shows no "depth" - it pretty much looks like a light gray piece of paper with dark gray text.

The display, based on technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff E Ink Corp., is composed of tiny capsules with electrically charged particles of white and black ink. When a static electric charge is applied on the side of the capsule that faces the reader, it attracts the white particles to the face of the display, making that pixel show light gray. Reversing the charge brings the black pigments floating through the capsule to replace the white pigments, and the pixel shows as dark gray.

Like paper, the display is readable from any angle, but it doesn't look as good as the real thing, chiefly because the contrast doesn't compare well. The background isn't white and the letters aren't black. The letters show some jaggedness, even though the resolution is a very respectable 800 by 600 pixels. It will display photos, though they look a bit like black-and-white photocopies.

But it's still a more comfortable reading medium than any other electronic display. The text is easy on the eyes in almost any light you could read a book by.

The other major advantage of the display is that it's a real power sipper. Sony says a Reader with a full charge in its lithium battery can show up to 7,500 pages, an amazing figure that I unfortunately didn't have the time to test.

The reason behind this trilogy-busting stamina is that the display only consumes power when it flips to a new page. Displaying the same page continuously consumes no power, though the electronics of the device itself do use a little bit.

The Reader's internal memory holds up to 100 books, depending on their size. The memory can be expanded with inexpensive SD cards or Memory Sticks.

To load books, connect the Reader with a supplied cable to a Windows PC running the accompanying software. You can transfer Word documents or Portable Document Format files to the Reader, download blog feeds, or buy e-books at Sony's online store. It will also play MP3 music or audiobook files.

 

The store is not live yet, so I was unable to test it, but the interface looks comfortably like that of iTunes. It should have 10,000 titles at launch, Sony said, with major titles from publishers like HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster and Penguin-Putnam. In keeping with the e-book market so far, there's no big price break: the electronic version will cost a dollar or so less than the printed book.

The Reader would be a perfect companion for the avid book reader, but for a few things.

First of all, navigation is fairly clumsy. You can't just enter the page number and jump to the page, nor can you enter a word or phrase to search for, as you can when reading a book on a PC. To get around, there are 10 buttons that will each take you a 10th of the way through text. You can also jump to chapter starts, or return to bookmarks. Still, this is very much a one-way device, designed for reading a book straight through from cover to cover.

This lack of interactivity is partly because the screen is slow to change, since it takes time for the pigments to move through the capsules. It takes about a second to display a new page. That means no scrolling through pages, and no note-taking on the screen - imagine having to wait a second for each letter you write to appear.

Secondly, and less importantly, the Reader handles PDFs poorly. It doesn't allow you to zoom in on them, so if they're formatted for standard 8.5-inch-by-11-inch pages, the text will be illegibly small.

Thirdly, the Reader doesn't have a built-in light source, unlike PCs and personal digital assistants. A small clip-on light of the kind sold for books should work well, though.

Because of these drawbacks, it's hard to see the Reader as something that will bust the e-book market open. But it deserves a much better reception than the generally small LCD-based devices that hit the market a couple of years ago, some of which are already discontinued.

Other competition comes from cell phones and PDAs, but none of them match the Reader for screen size, legibility and battery life. Laptops, Tablet PCs and tablet-style Ultra-Mobile PCs have the screen size, but are heavier, more expensive, take time to boot up and have short battery lives.

The real competition, though, will be printed books, which have so far defeated all digital contenders with their excellent "battery life" and "display quality." Sony's going to have to try a little harder before it can really start saving trees.

---

On the Web --- http://www.sony.com/reader

"Gutenberg 1, Sony 0:  Its reader is hurt by clunky software and a clueless bookstore," by Stephen H. Wildstrom, Business Week, October 16, 2006 --- Click Here 

"Sony Reader Is a Work in Progress," by Tom Bentley, Wired News, September 30, 2006 --- http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71844-0.html?tw=wn_index_3

At 7 inches by 5 inches and with a 6-inch diagonal screen, the Sony Reader approximates paperback size, though at only 0.5 inches high it's skinnier than most. Visually, the reading experience is uncannily like that of its paper counterpart: The Reader's 800-by-600 resolution is typographically crisp at any normal (and even abnormal) reading angle, and eminently readable in the sharpest sunlight.

This revelation is due to E Ink technology: Positively or negatively charged microcapsules display black or white on the screen, which holds that charge -- and the screen's image -- until another page's charge replaces it. The upshot of that is that you experience a static, non-flickering screen -- albeit a grayscale one -- with the added benefit of very low power consumption. I could discern some "ghosting" of the previous screen's contents on the display, but a Sony spokesman said that effect would be reduced at release time, though not completely eradicated.

Continued in article

"Review: Sony's Reader uses e-ink for e-books," MIT's Technology Review, September 27, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17550&ch=infotech

Books have been a bit of the orphan in the digital world. Music has the iPod. Video has YouTube. Books have, well, Amazon.com, where you can buy them printed on paper.

Sure, there are electronic books available for download at Amazon and elsewhere, but they haven't really caught on. Sony Corp. is now tackling part of the problem with the U.S. launch of the first e-book reader that imitates the look of paper by using an innovative screen technology.

Is this the iPod for books? Not quite. But it is a step forward.

The Sony Reader is a handsome affair the size of a paperback book, but only a third of an inch thick. It goes on sale for $350 on Sony's Web site Wednesday, and in Borders stores in October.

The 6-inch screen can be taken for a monochrome liquid-crystal display at first glance, but on closer inspection looks like no other electronic display. It's behind a thin pane of glass, but unlike an LCD it shows no ''depth'' -- it pretty much looks like a light gray piece of paper with dark gray text.

The display, based on technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff E Ink Corp., is composed of tiny capsules with electrically charged particles of white and black ink. When a static electric charge is applied on the side of the capsule that faces the reader, it attracts the white particles to the face of the display, making that pixel show light gray. Reversing the charge brings the black pigments floating through the capsule to replace the white pigments, and the pixel shows as dark gray.

Like paper, the display is readable from any angle, but it doesn't look as good as the real thing, chiefly because the contrast doesn't compare well. The background isn't white and the letters aren't black. The letters show some jaggedness, even though the resolution is a very respectable 800 by 600 pixels. It will display photos, though they look a bit like black-and-white photocopies.

But it's still a more comfortable reading medium than any other electronic display. The text is easy on the eyes in almost any light you could read a book by.

The other major advantage of the display is that it's a real power sipper. Sony says a Reader with a full charge in its lithium battery can show up to 7,500 pages, an amazing figure that I unfortunately didn't have the time to test.

The reason behind this trilogy-busting stamina is that the display only consumes power when it flips to a new page. Displaying the same page continuously consumes no power, though the electronics of the device itself do use a little bit.

The Reader's internal memory holds up to 100 books, depending on their size. The memory can be expanded with inexpensive SD cards or Memory Sticks.

Continued in article

"Yale University Press Goes the E-Book Route:  Google Plans Searchable Text in Images Searching Library Collections in Facebook," by Josh Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2644&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en 

Yale University Press Goes the E-Book Route Yale University Press is relying on a new piece of software to make its titles more widely available. The program, CoreSource, interfaces with Microsoft's Live Search Books program. The idea is that the press will be able to digitize more of its books and potential buyers will be able to find them through Live Search Books. If motivated by the text, users can become buyers through print-on-demand programs.

Microsoft's Live Search Books Program is part of Windows Live --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Search_Books

Clearly, the movement toward digital content delivery is gaining steam. And, as such, it is not surprising to read that the technology’s more vocal enthusiasts are forecasting nothing short of a revolution in academic research, teaching, reading, writing, and publishing once it becomes ubiquitous.Over at if:book, the collective blog of the “Institute for the Future of the Book,” commentators have had a great deal to say about the immense transformations that digital delivery and online publishing will effect on the academy and academics.
Scott W. Palmer, "If:book, Then What?" Inside Higher Ed, August 15, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/15/palmer

Bob Jensen's links to free electronic literature are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

New Textbooks in Electronic Formats

Most publishing firms now have alternatives for obtaining electronic versions of their textbooks.

August 15, 2006 message from Ivy Banaag [ibanaag@ECNext.com]

Hello Robert,

My name is Ivy, and I work for ECNext, Inc. After reviewing your website, specifically the Links section, http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000aaa/ebooks.htm , I wanted to propose you consider adding a new online textbooks site, iChapters.com.

iChapters.com offers brand new textbooks, in electronic & print formats. Electronic versions of college textbooks, including individual chapters, are available for immediate download at affordable prices. Only at iChapters.com can you choose to buy just what you need at the price you want to pay.

Students who frequent your website, especially those with a tight budget, will surely benefit from iChapters. I am hoping that you can help them find us by including iChapters ( http://www.iChapters.com ) on your Links section.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me ( ibanaag@ecnext.com ) if you have any questions.

Ivy iChapters.com

Bob Jensen's links to free electronic literature are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's search helpers, including book search helpers, are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

Can Sony make the iPod of electronic books?
See "Curling Up With a Good eBook," Business Week, December 29, 2005 --- http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2005/tc20051229_155542.htm?link_position=link1

March 31, 2006 message from Chuck White

I really appreciated your remark about what your print publications have meant to you as compared to the web based stuff. I have mentioned that to many since and pointed out how anachronistic paper publishing seems to be. Check out the new Sony book reader. Uses the electronic ink technology developed at MIT several years ago to render the screen infinitely more readable and brighter than the LCD screens and brighter than ink on paper. I am hoping this is the e-book reader that will end the talk of "I can't read from a computer screen."

chuck

Charles B. White
V.P. Information Resources and Administrative Affairs,
Trinity University

The Renewed Upward Trend in Portable Electronic Books
Richard D. Warren, a 58-year-old lawyer in California, is halfway through Ken Follett's novel Jackdaws. But he doesn't bother carrying around the book itself. Instead, he has a digital version of Follett he reads on his Palm Treo each morning as he commutes by train to San Francisco from his home in Berkeley. He's a big fan of such digital books. Usually, there are around seven titles on his Treo, and he buys at least two new ones each month. "It's just so versatile," he says. "I've tried to convert some friends to this, but they think it's kind of geeky." Geeky? For now, maybe, but not for much longer. Many experts are convinced that digital books, after plenty of false starts, are finally ready for takeoff. "Every other form of media has gone digital -- music, newspapers, movies," says Joni Evans, a top literary agent who just left the William Morris Agency to start her own company that will focus on books and technology. "We're the only industry that hasn't lived up to the pace of technology. A revolution is around the corner."
"Digital Books:  Start A New Chapter Lighter devices, better displays, and the iPod craze could make them best-sellers," Business Week, February 27, 2006 --- Click Here 

There are some points to take into consideration about "free textbooks" such as the ones that I list at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

1. Many of these "free" books are books that have been dropped by publishing firms or were never accepted by publishing firms in the first place. If they were dropped, they have met a rigorous reviewing process and may have made money for the authors. In fact they might have been dropped simply due to the all-to-frequent process of publishing company mergers that left publisher oligopolists with too many textbooks on a given topic.

2. Whereas the end consumer makes many choices about whether to use a product with advertising (e.g., magazine subscriptions, newspaper purchases, Google searches, etc.), the choice of a textbook is usually in the hands of instructors rather than end user students. In general, students are ceteris paribus grateful for free textbooks even if they must endure a certain amount of advertising. It's the "ceteris paribus" part that's a problem. Those new textbooks costing students $90 or more (without advertising) provide incentives for authors to make careful revised editions. Also publishing firms have the revenues to provide improved supplements (most of which really need improving in the accounting textbook market sector). As of yet free textbooks, with or without advertising, provide little monetary incentive to authors or free-book publishing firms to constantly improve the product.

3. Free textbooks are not available in hard copy. Some electronic publishers offer hard copy versions, usually at prices cheaper than photocopying entire books would cost. Many of us, and I mean me especially, prefer a hard copy version to read and an electronic version to search. Good electronic versions also provide convenient hypertext links and possibly even some multimedia. Although Cybertext does not offer free textbooks, I like the Cybertext option to also buy a hardcopy version. And I like the hot links in the electronic versions and the option to take quizzes online with results being graded and sent to instructors --- http://www.cybertext.com/
Publishers of free textbooks are never likely to offer such services unless advertising revenues become very successful. I don't think any of them are at that point yet.

 4. We should all be grateful that free textbooks exist even if we do not ourselves adopt them for our courses. In this age of price gouging by publisher oligopolies, the free textbook alternatives may be about the only serious competition that publishers face, especially when, not if, textbook publishers finally invent a way to eliminate the used textbook market in their own books.

February 14, 2006 message from a distributor of free textbooks (that do have advertising)

To date our free textbooks have been made possible by a combination of angel investor money and by the principals in the company, who have invested both their time and money. We have some advertisers (download a book and you'll see) and seek more. We are actively pursuing sponsorships. More investment has been promised. Authors receive a percentage of our revenues -- "net receipts"-- per book. They sign on because of their confidence in our business model and in us.

We sell the paperback copies pretty much at cost. Regardless, those monies are very limited, inasmuch as only about 5 percent of students, thus far, end up buying the print book.

What propels our business is the widespread perception that text prices are unreasonable. We are addressing this situation in an innovative way. Moreover, we do not skimp on instructor support; all our titles come with ancillaries available to adopters.

In this case, "free" really does mean free. This is not the proper forum, but I can provide testimonials and contact information for many people who already have benefited from this service.

Best wishes to all concerned!

Edgar Laube
Freeload Press
3316 Tally Ho Lane
Madison, WI 53705 608.233-1112
edlaube@gmail.com 
www.freeloadpress.com

For examples of free textbooks see  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks 

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic literature (mostly downloaded to PCs and Macs) are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Sony Reader:  The New eBook Alternative
Electronic books have traditionally gone straight from the manufacturer to the remainders bin -- but the market has never gone away entirely, despite years of tepid sales and failed predictions. Now a new device from Sony is generating buzz worthy of a Stephen King novel. Some people are even wondering whether the Sony Reader might be just the ticket to kick the e-book market into high gear.
Dylan Tweney, "Screening the Latest Bestseller," Wired News, January 24, 2006 --- http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70039-0.html?tw=wn_tophead_13

"The Shift Away From Print" by Eileen Gifford Fenton and Roger C. Schonfeld, Inside Higher Ed, December 8, 2005 http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/12/08/schonfeld 

Amazon Pages:  Amazon's Breakthrough Technology to Help Quadriplegic's Read

"Turning Pages for Those Who Can't," by Steven Edwards, Wired News, January 24, 2006 --- http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70052-0.html?tw=wn_tophead_4

I've been watching companies' efforts to develop e-book offerings for a long time. As a quadriplegic, I can't hold a book, so reading literature on the computer seems like an obvious solution.

Alas, companies like Microsoft, Adobe and Palm have failed in their e-book endeavors. They've introduced proprietary, encrypted formats that require their respective software to be installed before reading them, in effect destroying a book's inherent characteristic: portability.

Amazon seems to be on the brink of doing e-books right, and I'm keeping my proverbial fingers crossed. By taking advantage of the web's ubiquity, Amazon can restore portability: Pay once, read anywhere.

In November, Amazon announced two new services for accessing books online. The company seems to be targeting programmers and students who would welcome freedom from toting enormous texts. But Amazon has another, perhaps unforeseen, set of customers: the disabled.

Amazon Pages will allow readers to buy online access to individual pages and chapters from books instead of the entire thing, presumably for a few cents a page. Amazon Upgrade will let readers purchase, for a similar premium, perpetual access to an online digital copy of the text.

If the services turn out to be as good as they sound, I plan on taking full advantage of them. I miss the comforting sensation of curling up with a good book at night, promising myself that I would only read one more chapter before becoming so engrossed in the story that I devour it whole and am barely aware of the fact that, as my eyelids are closing, the sun is rising on the next day.

It truly is the little things in life that make it worth living.

The joy of holding a book again won't be happening in the next year, but Amazon's proposed services, assuming they are well implemented, will reopen the boundless horizons of literature to me and other similarly disabled readers.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, told Fox News that publishers will decide whether their books will be included in the programs, unlike Google Print, which requires publishers to opt out. Among the publishers I'm rooting for are Penguin Group and Tor. (So, give Mr. Bezos a call. Today. Please? The Shadowrun and The Wheel of Time series, among others, beckon.)

The Amazon services should allow publishers to have their content available as plain text, as do niche sites such as The National Academies Press, InformIT's Safari and Safari's predecessor site, MacMillan's Personal Bookshelf (an all-time favorite, now deceased, that allowed me to learn a lot for free).

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic literature are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on learning aids for the handicapped, disabled, and learning challenged persons --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped

Ariz. High School Swaps Books for Laptops
Students at Empire High School here started class this year with no textbooks _ but it wasn't because of a funding crisis. Instead, the school issued iBooks _ laptop computers by Apple Computer Inc. _ to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first U.S. public schools to shun printed textbooks.
Arthur H. Rotstein, "Ariz. High School Swaps Books for Laptops," The Washington Post, August 19, 2005 --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/19/AR2005081900273.html?referrer=email

Online Economics Textbooks --- http://www.oswego.edu/~economic/newbooks.htm

History of Economics --- http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/

Random House is exploring the possibility of selling its books online directly to consumers, the first such move by a major publisher.
Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, "Random House Considers Online Sales of Its Books," The Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2004, Page A3 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110308002114100603,00.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news 

More competition for readers than writers:  How to write your dream novel in the modern age
"Steal This Book. Or at Least Download It Free," by Claudia H. Deutsch, The New York Times, August 21, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/business/yourmoney/21lunch.html

The way Mr. Adler, 77 (there goes "you can't teach an old dog new tricks"), sees it, portable electronic readers will soon do to paper books what the Walkman and iPod did to boomboxes.

"Print publishing has had a great 500-year run, but the print book is morphing into the screen book," he said during a recent lunch at Pigalle, a French restaurant in Manhattan's theater district.

But what does that mean for those many, many people who believe there is a novel inside them, clamoring to be let out? Making a living as a writer has never been easy - even Mr. Adler was a self-described "failed writer" until, at 45, he finally caught a publisher's attention. So will all this technological upheaval make it easier or harder to get read?

Both, Mr. Adler insists. The Internet, with its limitless capacity for blogs and whole books that can be electronically whisked from place to place, means people can pretty well publish what they want. On the downside, the competition for readers, already intense, will become maddeningly so. But writers need not make it past the gatekeepers at publishing houses to be published. Vanity publishing - a term Mr. Adler hates - has come into the electronic age.

Continued in article

Question
Do you want to publish and distribute your writings, artwork, etc.?

One Answer
Diffusion (electronic books, interactive publishing, custom publishing) --- http://www.diffusion.org.uk/ 

DIFFUSION eBooks are PDF files for readers to download, print out and make into booklets - a simple and effective mode of publishing that bypasses typical distribution problems encountered by small presses and specialist publishers. The format allows small 'artist's books' or illustrated essays to be published and distributed digitally worldwide. The internet provides a radical platform for small presses to reach parts of the world that it would not be economical to distribute traditional books to. By making the eBook files free to download and re-distribute as well as small in size, the knowledge contained in the books can reach a far greater audience than was previously accessible.

The DIFFUSION format challenges conventions of interactivity - blending the physical and the virtual and breaking the dominance of mouse and screen as the primary forms of human computer interaction. The format's aim is to take the reader away from the screen and computer and engage them in the process of production. Through the physical act of making the eBook, a different dynamic is created and the distinctions between producer and consumer of knowledge and information are blurred.

DIFFUSION eBooks are free to download and distribute, electronically or as material objects. The format is 'open source': i.e. Proboscis welcomes the adoption or re-interpretation of the format by anyone, anywhere. Proboscis is also able to offer a design and production service for clients wishing to use the format - please email for prices.

New Technologies for Electronic Reading

The U.S. will announce plans to purchase 20,000 high-tech educational toys called LeapPads to educate rural Afghan women about health maintenance.
Queena Sook Kim, The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109149503340581281,00.html?mod=gadgets%5Fprimary%5Fhs%5Flt 

When Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson visited Afghanistan at the end of 2002, he found not just wrecked hospitals and a scarcity of health-care workers.

He also found a pressing need for health education among Afghan women. But in a country where 80% of women are illiterate, the agency couldn't rely on the educational pamphlets commonly used elsewhere in the world.

So Mr. Thompson turned to an unlikely solution: the educational toy LeapPad, a product of LeapFrog Enterprises Inc. of Emeryville, Calif. The electronic book sells for around $40 and is a mainstay in suburban U.S. homes; it is designed to teach reading, and recites out loud to kids when they touch the words on the page.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services plans to announce today that it is purchasing 20,000 LeapPads. Rather than featuring the likes of Dr. Seuss, these modified LeapPads will educate rural Afghan women about the benefits of immunization, the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and the perils of some homespun remedies, such as rubbing dirt into cuts to heal them. The special LeapPads talk in either Pashto or Dari, Afghanistan's two most common languages.

Mr. Thompson says such education is sorely needed in a country where diarrhea or acute respiratory infections kills nearly 40% of all children, and where 1,600 out of every 100,000 women die in childbirth. (The U.S. rate is 7.5.) "If this works, we can make this a tool across the world," says Mr. Thompson. "We can use it for AIDS in Africa and for health care in Iraq."

The $1.25 million deal could also give a much-needed boost to LeapFrog, one of the country's top toy makers. Launched in 1995 as a technology-based education company, LeapFrog made its first big splash with the 1999 introduction of LeapPad. Such electronic learning toys are now one of the fastest-growing categories in the industry; from 1999 to 2003, LeapFrog's overall revenue jumped from $71.8 million to $680 million.

But lately, both the toy industry and LeapFrog have seen sales dip. In LeapFrog's case, analysts said the company shipped too much product last Christmas, resulting in soft demand after the holidays. Those inventory problems helped push the company's share price down to below $20 from a high last year of $47.30.

Continued in the article

"Electronic Readers, Now on Sale in Japan, Still Don't Beat Paper," by Phred Dvorak, The Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,personal_technology,00.html 

Geeks the world over have long dreamed of the day when the content of books, magazines and newspapers will be downloaded digitally onto electronic readers. Yet despite an explosion of digital content and gadgets to read it on, paper still rules -- in part because nobody has yet been able to beat its portability and readability.

Now the world's two biggest consumer-electronics companies -- Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial, the maker of Panasonic devices -- are giving the digital book a whirl in Japan, though not yet anywhere else.

Both recently started selling electronic readers that let users view a variety of material downloaded from Internet sites. But despite some attractive services and compelling technology, a week of testing the Sony Librie and Panasonic SigmaBook reminded me how great paper still is.

The Sony Librie gets high marks for its svelte size: at 8.5 ounces and 5 inches by 7.5 inches by 0.5 inches, it's smaller and only a bit heavier than the 138-page instruction manual it ships with.

But its best feature by far is its display -- the first-ever consumer application of something called "electronic ink." The technology, developed by E Ink of Cambridge, Mass., forms images by electronically pulling around microscopic particles of black and white pigment that float in tiny capsules inside the screen. The result is a display that uses very little power and looks almost identical to black print on white paper. For reading, it's a vast improvement over the liquid-crystal displays common in notebook computers, PDAs and cellphones.

I took the Librie with me on a coffee run -- down a dim hallway, into the elevator and out into bright sunlight -- reading comfortably all the way. It also let me enlarge the text size up to 200%, and has a set of built-in dictionaries for easy reference.

But it didn't do as well on my graphics test, Vol. 1 of Shotaro Ishinomori's 1963 comic "Cyborg 009." The display left a faint afterimage of the previous page's lines on the black areas of the drawings. And with only four levels of gray shading, the images often looked rough. The Librie's relatively small screen was also a problem. Rather than shrinking the original page to fit the display, the publishers of "Cyborg 009" decided to put one frame on each page. The resulting story pace was so slow I got bored, even in the middle of a pitched battle between cyborgs and evil robots.

Part of the problem is that the Librie display's response is excruciatingly slow. "Turning" a page takes a full second, and using the jog wheel to move the cursor through menus is frustrating. It's still tolerable if you're chugging through a story from start to finish, but returning to a section you've read before is a real slog unless you've had the foresight to "bookmark" the page you want.

Where the Librie really fails is in its handling of digital content. It can only view content that comes from a site run by Publishing Link, a Sony-affiliated company with investments from most of Japan's big publishers. Users download digital books to their computers from there and then transfer them to the Librie, but only about 600 are available. What's more, your right to that content expires after 60 days. The only English-language books I saw being offered were textbooks.

The rental model keeps prices relatively low. I paid 315 yen ($2.89) to "rent" the autobiography of comic artist Shigeru Mizuki, which was selling for 609 yen ($5.60) new on Amazon Japan.

Though it costs the same hefty $370, Panasonic's SigmaBook reader gets right a lot of what Sony gets wrong. Although Panasonic's own online-content site, SigmaBook JP, has only a hundred titles, the SigmaBook can also handle content downloaded from an independent site called 10 Days Book, which mainly features comics but boasts around 5,400 titles.

The SigmaBook is also better suited to reading comics because it has two screens. At 7.2 inches they are bigger than the Librie's and capable of more tonal gradations. But the device is also twice as thick and almost twice as heavy as the Librie.

Continued in the article

What's new at London's famous Old Vic Theatre?

"9/11 Book Born Online Hits Stage," by M.J. Rose, Wired News, September 10, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55022,00.html 

When the curtain opens at London's famous Old Vic Theatre on Wednesday evening, most people in the audience won't realize they're watching what might be the world's first play conceived on the Internet.

Last year, e-publishing, print-on-demand and e-mail gave rise to a collection of essays by journalists and non-journalists on the Sept. 11 tragedy called 09/11 8:48 AM; Documenting America's Greatest Tragedy, co-edited by Ethan Casey and Jay Rosen, chairman of the journalism department at New York University.

The Old Vic performance -- a one-act play directed by veteran actor and director Murray Woodfield -- has been adapted from the personal testimonies of Rosen, Conor O'Clery, Peter Wong, Karmann Ghia, Kate Bolick, Dawn Shurmaitis and Andrew Ross.

Woodfield said he was gratified to be involved in the memorial performance.

"The fact that writers online ended up on the London stage probably means that this has got to be one of the first plays ever created solely via the Internet," he said. "Any way you look at it -- this is a unique event."

Proceeds from the event will go to The New York Firefighters 9-11 Disaster Relief Fund.

- - -

E-nabeling readers: Students with visual impairments or learning disabilities can listen to more than 97,000 digitally recorded books on CD.

The largest collection of its kind, the catalog offered by nonprofit Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D) includes 6,000 new titles -- from Harry Potter to Systems of Psychotherapy: a Transtheoretical Analysis.

RFB&D is the nation's largest educational library for students who are blind or visually impaired, or who have learning disabilities such as dyslexia.

The digitally recorded textbooks allow instant access to any page, chapter or subheading. Unlike books recorded on analog cassette, the digital versions don't force users to fast-forward through and count embedded beeps to find what they're looking for.

Continued at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55022,00.html 

Failed Ventures

The e-book market is littered with the wreckage of failed ventures.

Question
Are eBooks dead?

Answer
I think there is still a big market in textbooks, but the market for popular fiction and non-fiction has dwindled.
September 9, 2003 message from Barnes & Noble

Dear eBook Newsletter Subscriber,

As of September 9, 2003, Barnes & Noble.com will no longer sell eBooks. At this time, we will also be terminating our eBook Newsletter service.

"Barnes & Noble's Online Arm Pulls the Plug on E-Book Sales," by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2003 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106312780219656500,00.html?mod=technology%5Fmain%5Fwhats%5Fnews 

Publishers, she added, failed to make enough of a pricing distinction between hardcovers and their e-book counterparts. Barnes & Noble Inc., the nation's largest retailer, owns 38% of Barnes&Noble.com and is in the midst of buying Bertelsmann AG's 37% stake in the business. That purchase is expected to close within two weeks.

Some e-book publishers tried to play down the company's decision to exit from e-book retailing. Arthur Klebanoff, co-founder and chief executive of New York-based Rosetta Books LLC, an e-book publisher that has released 117 titles from such writers as George Orwell and John Updike, said the company's strongest retailer is Palm Digital Media, a unit of PalmGear Inc.

"On a sales basis, Barnes&Noble.com contributed a tiny percentage of Rosetta's revenue," said Mr. Klebanoff. "But they had an early leadership role in e-books. My guess is that they still believe in e-books in the long term, but that the economics in the short term don't make sense."

Barnes&Noble.com's decision comes at a difficult juncture for the e-book business. "Any defection is going to be a negative," said Mike Segroves, director of business development at Palm Digital Media. "While it will certainly be a reduction in revenue for some publishers, our business has been growing. We'd like to think that we can make up for the revenue publishers will lose from this -- but time will prove whether we are right or wrong."

Continued in the article.

August 30, 2002 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu] 

FUTURE OF E-BOOKS

"The e-book market is littered with the wreckage of failed ventures, and with some justification, one might think that it is approaching total collapse." In "Electronic Books: Reports of Their Death Have Been Exaggerated" (ONLINE, vol. 26, no. 4, July/August 2002), Donald T. Hawkins, editor-in-chief for Information Today, Inc. Information Science Abstracts and Fulltext Sources Online, charts the ups and downs of e-books and the market's successes and fiascos. Although e-book company failures have shaken the confidence of early-adopters, Hawkins believes that e-books still have a future. The article is available online at http://www.onlinemag.net/jul02/hawkins.htm

Online [ISSN: 0146-5422] is published six times per year by Information Today, Inc., 143 Old Marlton Pike, Medford, NJ 08055 USA; tel: 609-654-6266 or 800-300-9868; fax: 609-654-4309; Web: http://www.onlinemag.net/

In the article "Students Complain About Devices for Reading E-Books, Study Finds" (THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, August 26, 2002; http://chronicle.com/free/2002/08/2002082601t.htm), Scott Carlson reports on a study of the usability of e-books and their acceptance by college students. The study was conducted by Richard F. Bellaver, Associate Director, Center for Information & Communication Studies, and Jay Gillette, Director, Human Factors Institute, Ball State University. The researchers concluded, that if future improvements are made in the technology, e-books could be acceptable devices for delivering and storing students' reading materials. The study's report, "The Usability of eBook Technology: Practical Issues of an Application of Electronic Textbooks in a Learning Environment," is available online at http://publish.bsu.edu/cics/ebook_final_result.asp

The Chronicle of Higher Education [ISSN 0009-5982] is published weekly by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc., 1255 Twenty-third Street, NW, Washington, DC 20037 USA; tel: 202-466-1000; fax: 202-452-1033;

Web: http://chronicle.com/

But the e-book market is still "clicking" in academe.

I thank Kevin Kobelsky (USC) for the link below:
"E-textbooks clicking with colleges Most greet e-books with enthusiasm, but wariness remains, by Marsha Walton, CNN.com,  September 1, 2002 --- http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/30/coolsc.ebooks/index.html 
Note that the link above also has audio testimonials From students!

It's 4 a.m., the astronomy homework is due in just a few hours, and there's still confusion about some quirks in those mysterious quasars. What's a fretting college student to do?

If you're in professor Michael Ruiz's astronomy class at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, your answer may be just a few clicks away, in an online forum that every student in the class can access, 24-7.

"If you don't understand something it's nice to be able to ask another student without wandering the halls knocking on doors saying, 'Do you take astronomy? Do you take astronomy?' Just type it in the forum, and ask your question about stars or nebulae," said Margaret Eason, who is taking the class this semester.

The student forum is one of dozens of interactive and multimedia features in the electronic textbook written and produced by astronomy and physics professor Ruiz. Along with his academic credentials, he's an accomplished musician, and a veteran experimenter in all types of technology.

All three of those interests contribute to the interactivity of his online texts, filled with music, movies, experiments, and incentives. He's also created an e-book for his physics of sound class, filled with online videos of his own piano and keyboard performances.

Fast updates, around-the-clock access Ruiz's electronic texts are Internet-based. Students access the class Web site on a with a login and password.

"I'm more effective with a class of 90 today than I was 20 years ago with 30 people and some equipment up front. Let's face it, your best time might be 2 o'clock in the morning, so if you're in here half falling asleep, you can see that demonstration or experiment again at home, and absorb it," he told students in his sound class the first day of this semester.

One major advantage over traditional texts is Ruiz's ability to update information, literally within minutes. And that's crucial, he says, in a field like astronomy, with constant discoveries and debates.

Continued (with audio) at http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/30/coolsc.ebooks/index.html 

Electronic Book Trends on College Campuses

How do instructors give "open-book" exams without giving students full access to other computer files and even the wireless Web?

This is a mixed blessing for students.  It makes storage, transport, and searching more convenient, but it is difficult to read page after page on the screen.  And printing the pages is expensive.  As pointed out in the article, there is not a used book market.

"College Books Move Online," by Charles Goldsmith and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2004, Page B3 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108266691905691021,00.html?mod=technology%5Fmain%5Fwhats%5Fnews 

Faced with mounting criticism that the cost of new textbooks is too high, and vexed by students who buy cheaper used texts, Pearson PLC is making 300 of its most popular U.S. college textbooks available in a Web-based format for half the price of the print versions.

Beginning this autumn, specialized texts such as "Educational Research" and "Social Psychology," which normally retail in hardback for about $100, can for the first time be bought online for about $50.

"A lot of students have affordability problems," says Will Ethridge, president of Pearson's college-text unit.

Such price resistance poses a threat to the $3.4 billion-a-year U.S. college-textbook industry -- as students either buy used versions, seek cut-rate deals through foreign Web sites or do without.

Pearson's new strategy, if successful, will transform the college-textbook industry, which has been under attack from parents and students stunned by the rising cost of higher education. Complaints about high prices have become so bad that at a recent annual meeting, the American Association of Publishers handed out a pamphlet justifying the industry's prices, and the issue has become a heated topic at educational conferences.

The prospect of online textbooks would seem to raise piracy concerns, but Pearson, which is based in the United Kingdom, is confident that the system is secure.

"There is a sophisticated security protocol developed two years ago that protects the intellectual content from file sharing or access by unauthorized subscribers," says Wendy Spiegel, a spokeswoman for Pearson Education, based in New York. "This is not downloadable. It is a Web-based book with the full function of the Web. You can print it section by section, but not at one sitting. It won't continuously print for you. We envision that students will print out the parts of the chapter that they need that day. If you are a crook, you could duplicate a printed book much easier."

Those who have seen early prototypes of the online texts describe them as attractive and intriguing, and note that publishers have a significant incentive to see that Web-formatted books go mainstream. The traditional four-color hardcover book already is loaded up with related CD-ROMs and links to additional Web sites -- thus boosting costs.

Web-based books may well provide the solution. By transferring content to the Internet, publishers will be able to slash inventory costs, eliminate returns, reduce shipping expenses, and perhaps put a significant dent in the used-textbook business. Further, if they are able to pass along those savings, they should be able to lure back budget-minded students.

Pearson last year generated 19% of its revenue and 30% of its operating profit from college publishing. But executives have expressed concern that price resistance poses a future pothole. By the company's research, about a third of students say they don't buy all of their required texts, while half say they are likely to buy a lower-cost version online assuming a savings of at least $25.

Although textbook prices have been rising 2% to 3% a year, well below college-tuition increases, texts are a conspicuous billboard of college inflation, given that students pay for them directly. According to the College Board, the average tuition and fees at a four-year private U.S. college was $19,710 in the 2003-2004 school year, up 6% from the previous year.

A spokeswoman for the National Association of College Stores, representing more than 3,000 college retailers, says the group didn't expect online versions to rapidly displace print editions. "Most students in higher education still prefer a physical textbook" given that they grew up on such texts since childhood, she says.

One book retailer suggests that interactive books won't represent a significant price break for students, who usually sell their books at the end of the semester.

Mark Oppegard, chief executive of closely held Nebraska Book Co., which sells used and new college textbooks, notes that a student who bought a $100 new textbook could sell it back for $50 at the end of the semester. A student who bought a used book for $75 could get $37.50 for it. "The interactive books don't represent a real savings," he says. "Let's see how well they are received."

Publishing-industry officials say educational publishers typically make between $15 and $20 profit from a book with a retail list price of $100, after subtracting costs for author royalties, printing, distribution and retailers' take. In a goodwill gesture to college bookstores, Pearson said it would offer retailers a cut of revenue from online sales if stores direct students to the publisher's Web site.

Continued in article

October 15, 2002 advertisement Message from Alex von Rosenberg [alex@atomicdog.com] 

See Atomic Dog’s unique ability to develop online books that were interactive and customizable, but that were also translated to print products that met the needs of those that preferred that medium. An additional factor was the potential long-term impact of improving access to education by dramatically lowering the cost of a substantial student expense (textbooks) while simultaneously improving the overall quality. The final and most critical factor was the global impact that Atomic Dog’s products are already making along with the one-of-a-kind capabilities home grown in the State of Ohio. In less than two years Atomic Dog textbooks have gone from being used in 50 schools to over 550 schools in over 70 countries.

To learn more, visit: http://ecom-ohio.org/success_stories/AtomicDog.pdf 

September 25, 2002 message from Van Ness, Paul [Paul.VanNess@thomsonlearning.com] 

Bob, 

You might be interested to know that South-Western has business text books in ebook format available in Adobe Acrobat eBook format ( http://ebooks.swcollege.com ) and Rovia's ebook format ( http://store.rovia.com/?usca_p=t ). You'll find titles in Accounting, Business Communication, Business Law, Economics, Finance, Management, Marketing, Real Estate, and Tax.

Sincerely, 
Paul Van Ness Technology/Marketing 
South-Western/Thomson Learning http://www.swlearning.com 

 

Digitizing Education A Primer on eBooks by MICHAEL A. LOONEY and MARK SHEEHAN

EDUCAUSE Review, JULY/AUGUST 2001 Volume 36, Number 4
 http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0142.pdf  
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0142t.pdf  (text-only)

The eBook revolution has spawned several new support businesses: companies that provide DRM technology; content conversion houses, which aid publishers in converting existing print and electronic content to eBook formats; and system integrators and clearinghouses--such as Lighting Source ( http://www.lightningsource.com/ ), Reciprocal ( http://www.reciprocal.com/ ), iUniverse.com ( http://www.iuniverse.com/ ), and OverDrive (http://www.overdrive.com/)--which provide encryption, hosting, and e-commerce integration services to authors, publishers, and resellers.  Before long, specialized rich-media authoring services, copyright clearinghouses, and digital object vending services will also be established.  Besides these service providers, online resellers such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble have begun vigorously marketing eBook content, and online college bookstores will start to do the same fairly soon.  Finally, specialized system integrator companies will soon be assisting libraries with integrating eBooks into their lending systems.

 

How eBooks Add Value to Education

eBooks in the broad sense of electronic content) are ideal for the academic environment.  A number of social and economic factors make eBooks or digital content preferable to paper textbooks and course materials--or at least highly desirable as adjuncts to these materials.  First of all, eBooks provide a means for nontextbook course adoptions whether the material is a trade book (nonfiction, biography, etc.) or customized content authored by the faculty member or colleagues.  This is particularly appealing for upper-division courses, in which textbooks are used less frequently.

In addition, textbooks in eBook format can be made modular.  This will allow the faculty member to review a fifteen-chapter textbook and simply select the three or four chapters that are relevant to a course.  This modular selection can be offered electronically and as a POD book in the bookstore, with either option costing considerably less than the price of the complete printed textbook.

Another distinct advantage of eBooks is the equality of access to learning materials they provide to both the campus-based and the distant learner.  Students who are literally anywhere in the world will have access to the same content that is available to the student on campus, whether that access is through the faculty Web site, the college bookstore, or the digital library.  Furthermore, with dictionary plug-ins and automated text-to-speech technology, the eBook reader software can greatly benefit students whose primary language is not English.  Similarly, students and faculty of foreign languages, as well as international students in the United States, will be able to access digital content in real time from a broad range of countries, whether it be a Manga comic from Japan or an original, native-language version of a scholarly publication from France.

The eBook format also opens the door to the many precious and rare documents that are currently under lock and key in collections around the world.  Typically inaccessible to the average student, these will become available, as digital representations, to any student in any location.  Several examples of these rare publications, now available as eBooks, can be experienced at the Octavo Web site (http://www.octavo.com/).

As previously mentioned, eBooks can be enriched with a broad range of media types to help with the learning process.  For example, MIT's Sloan School of Management is already preparing "Knowledge Updates," brief research updates from MIT faculty.  Complete with video, audio, and potentially animated materials, these updates are current research snapshots intended as much for alumni, corporate customers, and friends of Sloan as for current students.

Keeping current is an additional advantage of eBooks.  For courses on cutting-edge technologies or current affairs, textbooks are out-of-date the minute they are printed.  eBooks can enable daily, weekly, or monthly updates via the Internet.  This would eliminate out-of-date textbooks and would help the student and instructor stay on top of developments relevant to their courses.

eBooks can also improve on qualities of traditional printed books.  Like a paper book, the eBook will become marked with highlighting, with page corners turned down for quick reference, and with notes made in the margins of the pages.  The difference with the eBook is that all of these aids will be the user's own amendments rather than the vestiges of the learning habits of previous owners.  In addition, the digital medium is often simply more convenient or appropriate as either a replacement for or an adjunct to the potentially heavier, environmentally unfriendly paper medium.

Finally, another factor that may influence the adoption of eBooks and other digital courseware is the financial model used by traditional textbook publishers and the financial burden this model imposes on students.  The average price of a new textbook in 1998 was almost $62, and this price is anticipated to increase 4-6 percent per year.  This represents a nearly 500 percent increase since 1965.  Contributing factors to this worsening economic scenario include the fact that 24 percent of all academic books are returned to publishers from college  bookstores and the fact that each purchased book is turned over six times or more on average before it is out of circulation.  As a result, one-third of students buy used books, and one-third do not even purchase the book required for the course.  Only 10 percent of textbook sales are to international markets, due increasingly to hard-copy piracy as the costs of books increase.  All of these factors, coupled with bookstores' and publishers' profit margins, lead to textbook prices that in some cases are higher than the tuition for the course.  Through the utilization of an eBook "workflow" process that can leverage not only eBooks but also POD books and modular content, eBooks are an opportunity for academic textbook publishers to provide students with content that is of higher value and is potentially less expensive.

eBookWeb ---- http://www.ebookweb.org/ 
News, resources, reviews, etc.

"A University That Reveres Tradition Experiments With E-Books," by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education,  May 18, 2001 --- http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i36/36a03901.htmb 

Textbook pages never rustle during a University of Virginia seminar about the Salem witch trials, because printed books have bee