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 (or into computers) 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 links to free online textbooks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

Free online tutorials, videos, and other learning aids in various disciplines --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials

Links to other open sharing sites --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's history of book authoring, course authoring, and course management technology --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm

Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

Hard Copy versus Electronic Textbooks 

Custom Publishing 

2009 Update on electronic books

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

2009 Updates on Electronic Books

Questions
After testing seven of the most popular e-book readers to date, what did PC World magazine was their top choice to purchase (if you could only have one reader)?

What in the world justifies this unsuspected choice?

"The Best of Today's E-Book Readers:  The number of high-quality e-readers available is mushrooming. We tested seven and gave our highest marks to one that might surprise you," by Yardena Arar, PC World via The Washington Post, November 6, 2009 --- Click Here

If you think the universe of e-book readers begins with the Kindle 2 and ends with the Kindle DX, think again. That universe is expanding rapidly. We recently completed thorough hands-on testing of seven of the top e-readers available today and came to a surprising conclusion: Our number one choice isn't from Amazon at all; it's the Sony Reader Touch Edition.

Sony's $300 reader matches the Kindle 2's screen size and quality but adds a touchscreen and support for free e-books and Adobe ePub, an e-book file format that book publishers and resellers have widely embraced. Whereas Adobe's PDF reproduces a fixed image of a page, ePub permits text to reflow in order to accommodate different fonts and font sizes.Certainly the wireless connectivity in Amazon's Kindle models makes buying new books a breeze, but to this point Amazon's readers support only Amazon's format, locking you into buying exclusively from the online giant.

Of course, no company's lead in the rapidly evolving e-reader market is safe. Barnes & Noble looks to be one of Amazon's chief competitors. The giant bookseller announced its Nook e-reader last month, and most people who got a peek at the device seemed to love it. The Nook isn't yet available for thorough testing, however.

E-books have numerous benefits. Eliminating paper saves resources. E-book readers take up little room in travelers' backpacks and purses, and yet can store the equivalent of a whole bookshelf. You don't have to go anywhere to buy or borrow an e-book title. For the vision-impaired, the ability to adjust font size can mean the difference between being able to read a book and having to hope that the publisher will eventually release an audio version. Some e-book readers double as music players, and some even have a speech capability for reading books aloud.

Unfortunately, the world of e-books is Balkanized, with multiple incompatible file formats and digital rights management (DRM) technologies, and devices with varying support for both. Books in the public domain are widely available in PDF and other standard formats. But copyrighted material is another story. Amazon's current Kindles can obtain commercial e-books in Amazon's AZW file format via wireless download only in the United States (in early October, however, the company announced a Kindle capable of downloading content in most countries).

Adobe offers a DRM technology called Adobe Content Server 4. Sony and a number of other online bookstores--most notably Borders--sell commercial titles in ePub/ACS4 format, and some libraries let patrons check out ePub books. As of early October, 17 e-book readers supported ePub and ACS4, making that combination the closest thing the industry has to a standard for DRM-protected books. Aside from the Amazon Kindles and Foxit's eSlick, all of the e-book readers in this collection of reviews support ePub/ACS4.

We compiled a comparison chart of the five highest-ranking e-readers at the conclusion of our evaluations. For the details, see our Top 5 E-Book Readers chart. And for individual reviews of the seven e-readers we put through their paces --- http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/collection/1985/.html .
Jensen Comment
Today, November 6, 2009,  the comparison buttons would not work for me.

Bob Jensen's links to free books, poems, and textbooks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's threads to open sharing courses, tutorials, and videos from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

New Books Downloaded Directly Into Your Laptop
All along I've claimed that the best electronic book reader will be a laptop computer (or giant screen HDTV) that requires no special reader. Now Amazon is selling software that will do just that so that you have all your computer's multimedia capabilities and only have to lug one machine when on the road. Also can you imagine having a computer projection on the ceiling so that persons confined to bed can read books on the ceiling --- beats a skylight.

An advantage of using your computer for reading books is that you can buy huge monitors for ease of reading books. Also a Kindle reader holds up to 1,500 (non-multimedia) books, but your computer with over 100 Gb of hard drive will hold many more books, including multimedia books and newspapers.

An advantage of Amazon over some other electronic book readers to date lies in having more new books available for downloading (not free of course) than competitors. This may only be a short-term advantage.

Kindle for PC --- No Amazon link on October 23, 2009 but it will soon have a purchase link on Amazon

"Amazon to release free Kindle software for PC," MIT's Technology Review, October 22, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/23794/?nlid=2455&a=f

Amazon.com Inc. is trying to get more people to buy the electronic books that are compatible with its Kindle gadget by offering free software for people to read them on a computer.

The Seattle-based online retailer said Thursday that it will release an application called "Kindle for PC" in November. It will let you buy, download and read Kindle books on a Windows-based PC, regardless of whether you own a Kindle.

If you also own a Kindle, you can see any notes or highlights made on the e-reader.

Amazon will also keep track of where you are in a book, so you can stop reading on your PC and pick up at the same place on your Kindle.

If you're running Microsoft Corp.'s new Windows 7 operating system and have a touch screen on your computer, you can zoom in on book pages by pinching your fingers. In the future, Amazon said, you'll be able to turn pages by swiping a finger across the screen.

The company already offers a similar application for Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iPod Touch that lets users read Kindle books whether or not they own the device.

Amazon is facing a rising tide of competition in the e-reader market from companies like Sony Corp. and Barnes & Noble Inc. Sony already offers several e-readers, and both companies plan to release wireless-enabled devices soon that, like the Kindle, will be able to download books straight to them. Making Kindle books available to consumers who don't want to buy a dedicated reading device may provide another stream of revenue.

Also Thursday, Amazon said that it lowered the price of its newest Kindle by $20, to $259, matching the cost of a U.S.-only device that it is discontinuing. The new version has wireless access that works around the world, replacing a model that worked only in the U.S.

Just two weeks ago, when it introduced the international Kindle, Amazon cut prices for the U.S. version by $40, to $259.

The company still sells a larger-screen version of the Kindle called the DX for $489.

You can read more about the competitors (Sony, Barnes and Noble Nook, Google eBooks, Apple Tablet eReader, QVC Cool-er, etc.)  and their histories in the electronic book market in my threads at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm

The Hot, Hot Electronic Book Market

Oh No! My wife buys at least one of everything from QVC.

"Kindle Rival Cool-er to Hit QVC," by Lauren Goode, The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2009 ---
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/10/07/kindle-rival-cool-er-to-hit-qvc/?mod=rss_WSJBlog?mod=

The e-reader is going home-shopping for the holidays.

Shortly after Amazon cut the price of its Kindle e-reader, Interead, maker of the rival Cool-er device, said it has signed on with home-shopping network QVC to help it launch Cool-er in the U.S.

QVC will offer the e-reader, at an undisclosed price, as part of its “Today’s Special Value” program, commonly referred to as “TSV,” in early December.

The deal “offers more of a mass-market approach,” said Neil Jones, Interead’s chief executive. “We’ve been looking at non-traditional retail channels for our e-readers, as opposed to just doing deals with bookstores.”

Forrester Research said Wednesday that the e-reader market is outpacing expectations, and Mr. Jones said his biggest concern is ensuring that Interead has enough Cool-er supply for the holiday shopping season. The device will still be available for purchase through the company’s Web site.

It currently retails in the U.S. for $250, about what a Kindle costs. The Amazon device’s price cut is its second in three months, though it is still more expensive than its biggest competitor, the Sony E-Reader.

Mr. Jones started Interead in May with the goal of being a “people’s e-reader,” after his novel was rejected by agents and publishers. The Cooler has attracted attention for its colorful looks and lightweight feel but received mixed reviews in terms of functionality.

He said the company is on target to sell 160,000 to 200,000 units by the end of year, more than it initially expected but far less than some Wall Street estimates that Amazon will sell as many as 1.5 million Kindles.

In September, Interead announced a Google partnership that Mr. Jones said boosted sales and Web traffic, though he declined to give specific numbers.

Interead plans to unveil new features, including wireless capabilities and color electronic ink, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, he said.

"Discovery E-Book Filing Raises Eyebrows:  Md. Firm Mum on Patent Application," Mike Musgrove, The Washington Post, August 29, 2009 --- Click Here

Is Discovery Communications gearing up for a jump into the suddenly hot e-book space? A filing made public this week by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office raises that possibility.

According to the filing, the Silver Spring-based media company applied in February for a patent on a product it describes as an "electronic book having electronic commerce features."

The company did not respond to a call Friday seeking comment on the matter.

Whatever Discovery's plans are, the electronic book market is shaping up to be this year's most sought-after space by consumer electronics makers. In the wake of considerable buzz for Amazon's Kindle, consumer electronics giant Sony has been aggressively courting the market, with a $200 version of its electronic reader announced this month and set for a release any day now. What's more, the tech industry abounds with rumors about a new tablet-shaped computer possibly on the way from Apple, a product that many think will incorporate some e-book features.

Discovery, by comparison, surprised the tech world earlier this year when it filed a lawsuit against Amazon, claiming that the online retailer's popular Kindle product infringes on an electronic book patent held by the media company, which is better known for its cable offerings such as the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. Amazon has since countersued Discovery, claiming that the cable TV company is infringing on some of its own e-commerce patents.

Discovery had not -- and still has not -- made many public statements about moving into the consumer electronics arena. But according to the company's patent application, the device would be able to play audio and video files. While other e-readers currently on the market can play audio files, they typically don't play video clips.

Discovery's filing describes the device as being shaped like a paperback book and containing "a novel combination of new technology involving the television, cable, telephone and computer industries."

Continued in article

October 9, 2009 message from Amy Dunbar to the AAA Commons

I love my Kindle DX.  I was won over when I discovered you could make the text larger (but not in the pdf files) and, best of all, when you place your cursor in front of a word you see the definition at the bottom of the page. Reading with the detachable light is great at night. 

I was going to wait until Amazon put in a decent file mechanism so that all the books aren't in one folder, but after borrowing a friend's Kindle and seeing how easy it is to read, I had to have one.  Zero regrets!  Of course, there is research to say that buyers generally don't have regret to avoid post-purchase dissonance.  ;-)

And yes, I do store research papers in pdf format on the Kindle so I don't have to lug them around. 

In comparison with Kindle and Apple e-Book readers, Google will sell books over the Internet that can be read on any Internet browser.

"Preparing to Sell E-Books, Google Takes on Amazon," by Motoko Rich, The New York Times, May 31, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/technology/internet/01google.html?hpw

Google appears to be throwing down the gauntlet in the e-book market.

In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google. The move would pit Google against Amazon.com, which is seeking to control the e-book market with the versions it sells for its Kindle reading device.

. . .

Google’s e-book retail program would be separate from the company’s settlement with authors and publishers over its book-scanning project, under which Google has scanned more than seven million volumes from several university libraries. A majority of those books are out of print.

. . .

 

Mr. Turvey said Google’s program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. “We don’t believe that having a silo or a proprietary system is the way that e-books will go,” he said.

He said that Google would allow publishers to set retail prices. Amazon lets publishers set wholesale prices and then sets its own prices for consumers. In selling e-books at $9.99, Amazon takes a loss on each sale because publishers generally charge booksellers about half the list price of a hardcover — typically around $13 or $14.

Jensen Comment
I've always claimed that the best device for e-Book reading is a computer. This allows laptop users to have access to new books without having to lug about another device. It also gives more wide ranging screen sizes, including the largest computer screens available. Eventually, these books will probably be available on HDTV

Public reviews are also available on Amazon for many current textbooks. However, most of these reviews emphasize the positive and eliminate the negative. Perhaps, as with the classics, the authors must die before members of our academy feel free to write negative as well as positive reviews.

A music composer at Trinity University once had a cartoon on his door that said composers have no chance whatsoever until they've been dead at least 200 years.

"Amazon Reviewers Take On the Classics What if the Internet had existed centuries,"
by Joe Queenan, The Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574356541209342218.html

One superb innovation of recent times is the readers' review section on Amazon.com. Here ordinary people get to voice their opinions, acting as cultural watchdogs to shield their fellow book lovers from duds. Certain individuals have built quite a reputation for themselves online, their aperçus vying with the phoned-in ruminations of the snooty, burned-out hacks who masquerade as professionals at our top magazines and papers.

Of course, some reviewers can get a bit coarse and personal in the rough-and-tumble world of Internet interfacials, but for the most part these gifted amateurs inject a much-needed breath of fresh air into the reviewing process. Most appealing is their absolute fearlessness when it comes to trashing high-profile authors that mainstream reviewers would hesitate to mix it up with.

Beholden to no man, cloaked in anonymity, they do not hesitate to take even the brightest stars —Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster, Dan Brown—to task. This is what makes citizen reviewers such a welcome addition to the body politic: Their courageous sniping from behind the bushes, emulating Ethan Allen and the Swamp Fox back in 1776, reaffirms that democracy functions best when you fire your musket and then run away.

It is always fun to go back in time and speculate on what might have happened had Anne Boleyn been on Facebook, or had Pharaoh's army included amphibious equipment. This is why I cannot help wondering what a typical Amazon.com review might have looked like had the Internet existed centuries ago:

• "King Lear"—Average reader rating: Two stars. The author tells us: "As like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport." Oh, right, like I didn't know that? Like I didn't know that to be or not to be is the question? Like I didn't know that the fault lies not in us but in the stars? Tell me something I don't know, Mr. Bard of Whatever.

• "The 120 Days of Sodom"—Average Reader's Rating: Five stars. OK, so I like totally pre-ordered this book based on the author's name, which just happens to be the same as my maiden name—Marquis de. Yeah, a sketchy reason to buy a book, but I was pumped. But when it got here I didn't understand it at all. It just didn't go anywhere. It just kept repeating itself. I went through it a few times more, searching for some deeper, awesome meaning, but just ended up totally bummed. Actually, some parts of it were kind of gross.

• "Oedipus Rex"—Average reader rating: Four stars. Sophocles is a satisfying author who writes in clear, snappy prose. Youngsters in particular could learn a lot by imitating Mr. Rex, until he goes a bit off the rails toward the end. Nothing earth-shattering here, but zippy stuff. Have to admit I'm still puzzled by the weird subplot involving Mr. Rex's mother.

• "The Aeneid"—Average reader's rating: Two stars. Whine, whine, whine! Okay, so your hometown burnt to the ground and your family got wiped out, but do you have to keep bellyaching about it? Where's that gonna get you, Mr. Grumpy? Basically, Virgil is a poor man's Tacitus. He goes on and on about Priam and Dido and Zeus, when all the reader wants is to get to the good part when the Trojans defile the Vestal Virgins. And talk about a rip-off: He doesn't even include the story about the one-eyed giant who can turn pigs into Greeks!

• "On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres"—Average Reader Rating: Three stars. Those who have read my countless reviews elsewhere know that I am a mathematician, astronomer, polyglot and philosopher in my own right, and therefore uniquely qualified to discuss everything from Zeno's Paradox to Gordian's Knot. Mostly, I think my fellow polymath Copernicus has done a pretty solid job here. The thing most laymen don't realize—unlike mathematicians/ philosophers/astronomers/polymaths like me (as those familiar with my numerous other reviews can tell you)—is that people like Copernicus are really good with numbers. Just as I am. Really, really good. (Me, that is.) Readers seeking more of my unique insights can reach me at Igor@mymommysbasement.com.

• "Deuteronomy"—Average Reader's Rating: Three stars. I don't get it. I've read most of the books in this series, and they totally kick butt, but this one leaves me scratching my head. Is there a story here? Am I missing something? Why so much talk about clean and unclean beasts? The author really got on a roll with Genesis and Exodus, and I was on the edge of my seat when I read The Book of Numbers. But this one runs out of gas early. Now I'm glad I skipped Leviticus!

• "Mein Kampf"—Average reader's rating: One star. Lively writing, but just too, too depressing. Why does he keep using big words that normal people can't understand, like lebensraum and oberkommandant? Hey! I own a thesaurus, too! And what's up with the Jewish thing?

Mr. Queenan, a satirist and writer, is the author, most recently, of the memoir "Closing Time" (Viking, 2009).

Jensen Comment
Public reviews are also available on Amazon for many current textbooks. However, most of these reviews emphasize the positive and eliminate the negative. Perhaps, as with the classics, the authors must die before members of our academy feel free to write negative as well as positive reviews.

A music composer at Trinity University once had a cartoon on his door that said composers have no chance whatsoever until they've been dead at least 200 years.

Although Amazon sells many of the classics, most classics can also be downloaded for free ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
The above link also includes free textbooks and videos that can be downloaded for free.

"Google Books to add Creative Commons books," The Washington Post, August 14, 2009 --- Click Here

Google Inc. is now enabling authors and publishers who release their work under Creative Commons licenses to distribute it through Google Books, a free service that allows users to search and read books online.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit group that encourages writers, artists and others to use its licensing tools to let their work to be reused and shared by others in certain ways.

In a blog post Thursday, Google Books associate product manager Xian Ke wrote that rights holders who are already part of Google Books' partner program can update their account settings. Those who aren't can sign up to be a partner and choose one of seven different Creative Commons licenses.

People will be able to download these books from Google Books and share them. If rights holders indicate that people can modify their books, readers will be able to do that, too.

Those who download the books will be agreeing that they will only use them in the ways the license says they may. This could include giving the author credit if they remix the work or distribute it publicly,

Links to millions of free books can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Sixty-nine percent of university research libraries plan to increase spending on e-books over the next two years, according to a recent study published by Primary Research Group Inc. This finding and others were based on a survey of 45 research libraries in countries around the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan.
Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 30, 2008 --- Click Here

Amazon Plans to Market Its E-Book Reader to Colleges
Amazon is considering entering the student textbook market with a new version of its Kindle e-book reader, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Most publishers now offer electronic versions of their textbooks, but so far there's not an attractive enough e-book reader, and Amazon aims to fill that void. The college-oriented new model might be larger and include student-friendly features, such as allowing making annotations, according to a technology blog. Amazon officers also said the high Kindle sales estimates calculated by TechCrunch--a popular blog on internet products and companies--are not accurate. But the electronic company refuses to make public how many e-book reader units it has sold since Kindle was launched last November.
Maria José Viñas, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3268&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

"The Incredible Vanishing Book," by Christopher Conway, Inside Higher Ed, November 3, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/11/03/conway

We don’t know how soon it will happen, but it is happening and it will be consummated soon. The commodity of the book, as we have known it for the last few decades, is vanishing and being replaced by new electronic media. Paper-and-binding books have irrevocably begun to fade away as products of mass consumption and will soon transform themselves into curios like vinyl records. The age of the massive emporium bookstore is coming to an end under the crushing, virtual weight of the Internet. Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader is doing well and it promises to get better and cheaper in the future. Textbook companies have developed publishing platforms, like www.ichapters.com, for textbooks to be digitally delivered to students through a price-per-chapter system. And worst of all, if you’re a paper-and-binding book lover such as myself, people are reading less paper than before.

In the diverse, mostly Latino first generation student population that I teach, responses to the paper-and-binding book are often mediated by practical economics. A few years ago I assigned Antonio Skármeta’s beautiful, hardcover children’s book about dictatorship, The Composition, to a Latin American literature class. The Spanish edition I assigned cost about $25, which I didn’t consider to be too much, especially because the total cost for all the books in my class was under $70. All but one of the books I assigned were books that I thought were beautiful as artifacts and as stories. These books, I believed, would command students’ minds and hearts to such a degree that students would want to keep them after the class was over. Most of all, Skarmeta’s book, with its color illustrations and poignant lessons about life and death issues was a book that I was excited to teach to my students. When we got to discussing the book in class, several of my students did not have the book, only black and white photocopies because they could not or did not want to buy the book. I felt a strange mix of powerlessness, disappointment and distance. I had conscientiously made my class inexpensive compared to other classes, but it was not inexpensive enough.

Lest you think that this was an isolated situation, a few examples from one of my current classes come to mind. I have one student who has not bought any of the books on the syllabus because he reads the 19th-century classics I have assigned off of the Internet on his laptop, which he brings to class for discussions. Another student has already begun returning the books we’ve read in class so far, after confirming that they would not be covered in the final exam. A third student, a talented and curious young man who arrives to class with an ipod plugged into his ears, is a graduating senior who had never read a novel before my class. They are all bright, responsible and hard-working students but they are not consumers of books. This is also reflected in the reaction that dozens upon dozens of students have had upon entering my office over the years and noticing my 5 or 6 huge bookshelves full of books. They ask: “Have you really read all of these books?” Which sometimes leads to an interesting conversation about my library, in which I explain which parts are my teaching reference and which parts are the books that I’ve read cover to cover.

The fate of the book in the university classroom is impacted by many factors: the use of instructional technology, the economics of textbook publishing and the pedagogical idiosyncrasies of professors, who either promote the disappearance of the paper-and-binding book or try to reinforce its value in the classroom. Let’s look at each one of these factors for a moment. Naturally, in some contexts and disciplines, it is relatively easy to teach a class without books thanks to the wealth of realia and sources on the Web, whether they be freely available, or available through institutionally subscribed databases. In fact, I find great material online and value its role in my courses. I think that we can agree that some material may be best taught off of the Internet.

The economics of textbook publishing is a little bit more complicated and ties in with the surprising choices some faculty members make as teachers. The bottom line is that a lot of textbooks are just too expensive for what you get. There are certain kinds of textbooks, ubiquitous in certain disciplines, that have become monsters of paper and color, a carnival of colored insets and attention-getting graphic design and layout. They are alternately exciting or stupid, but always exhausting. Worst of all, they are dreadfully disposable. The dizzying rate at which one edition substitutes another so that a publisher can make a profit or stay in business makes these books as valuable and as enduring as colored photocopies. This wasteful, pathetic cycle is the best argument for doing away with over-saturated textbooks altogether and going to an online, subscription model.

Other textbooks are more modestly priced and dispense with the graphic fireworks and multiple editions. These thoughtful anthologies or edited volumes are reasonably priced and straddle the border between textbook and stand-alone book. You can see their classroom application immediately but you can also see these books sitting on a public or university library shelf, and yes, even resting on your average reader’s night table. These books are the innovative work of professors, not a corporate marketing team, and are designed for other professors to use in their classes. Although reasonably priced, you would be mistaken to think that all professors value such books. Many professors will spend countless hours putting together elaborate and voluminous course packets of photocopies for classroom use (I used to be one of them). And now, it is more frequent for technologically minded teachers to file-share large numbers of PDFs through password protected sites on campus. This is so wrong it hurts. We are killing our own chances to have readers in the future or be remunerated for the scholarship we do. It’s not only about the modest royalties that faculty authors may or may not receive, it’s about the principle of valuing each other’s scholarship and editorial work. I order good, attractive and useful paper-and-binding books or textbooks for my classes because I want there to be a system in place to support my work as an author and editor in the future.

If the paper and binding book vanishes as a dominant commodity, as it seems to be, maybe the new virtual system of book distribution, reproduction and delivery will allay some of the problems I describe in relation to photocopies and PDFs. It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable ‘readers’ or anthologies culled from existing print material without bypassing rights and fees and without overloading students with unnecessary expense. If this wave of the future takes hold and becomes the new standard in textbook publishing, I think it will be good for all parties involved. But what about the paper-and-binding book? Say you are teaching David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and you had a choice between an excellent paper-and-binding edition by a major academic press, with useful footnotes and front matter, and an electronic edition that students could download to their handy e-book readers, along with selected secondary articles you have selected for them to read? What if their e-book readers had a stylus and/or a network that enabled the class to annotate those assigned texts, and share them over the class network? I don’t think anyone’s nostalgia for paper-and-binding can replace the pedagogical value of my not-so-fanciful or far-fetched e-book scenario.

And yet I am sad about the fading of the paper-and-binding book and I am not going into the good night without putting up a good fight. I am committed to making the cost of my assigned books affordable. I order my books with care and I try to use them in their entirety, so that students get affordable books that are actually used in the class. This does not mean that I limit myself. I do use the occasional supplement (or two or three) and I share with my classes my disagreements with the books or textbooks that I am using. I continue to pick books that I believe are worth keeping and treasuring, both for the words they contain and for their tactile beauty as works of art and design. I want the books that my students hold in their hands to have the heft of what is important and of what is beautiful. I want that student who never read a novel before my class to value the physicality of the reading a paper-and-binding book. This endangered act, after all, will connect him to a centuries-old, vanishing tradition that has touched the lives of millions and altered the course of history on many occasions. That’s just too good to pass up.

Bob Jensen's threads on available online books are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

"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/

2009 Updates

Book Readers versus Hard Copy Textbooks

Much still depends upon the textbook publishers.

The ideal for Kindle is where virtually all textbook publishers have Kindle versions. Then for every semester all the required textbooks in all courses can loaded onto Kindle. Gone are the heavy backpacks. The savings to students across the years will depend upon how much discount is obtained on Kindle versions relative to used hard copy prices.

It’s inevitable that the day will come when hard copy will no longer be an option because of hard copy printing costs, inventory carrying costs, logistical costs of shipping to stores or retail customers, and the costs of buying back unsold copies from the stores. The question is when this day will arrive. My guess is that we are at least ten years or more away from that point in time. Between now and 2020, book readers will improve greatly just like laptop computers improved greatly between 1995 and 2009.

Students gain the immense advantage of Kindle’s word search. Students lose all the comfort and other traditional benefits of curling up in bed or chair with a book.

There is much more risk with a Kindle. If a student loses a book or has a book stolen it’s one book. If a Kindle is stolen it can be the loss of all of a semester’s textbooks. There’s also the risk that Kindle needs to be repaired. I might say Kindle becomes kindle that goes up in smoke, but that’s probably going a bit too far. Eventually there might be local repair/replacement shops for Kindles, but that day is way off into the future.

In ideal circumstances, students should be able to submit police reports to publishers or Amazon for free replacement downloads in a replacement Kindle. Perhaps the Kindle licensed repair shops of the future will be able to download free replacement books.

Can you imagine 12 students coming ten days before the final exam and reporting that their Kindles were stolen? In the past I’ve carried a few extra textbooks for the occasional circumstance where a student needs to borrow a book for a few days. Textbook reps usually supplied me with a few copies for such purposes, but with Kindle the textbook rep will eventually be out of the picture, especially when publishers cease to publish hard copy textbooks.

I personally think the risk of dependency on a Kindle is too high until publishers and/or Amazon take away the worst risks. One possibility would be to sell a backup hard drive that will only work with a given Kindle or replacement Kindle. Then a student who must replace a Kindle could get the secret password to download from the hard drive into the replacement Kindle.

I’ve not yet purchased a Kindle and am waiting for some improvements like multimedia and computing capabilities. But if I were a student today given a choice between hard copy and a Kindle version, I would go for the hard copy every time in spite of putting my spine at risk with a heavy backpack. I guess only nerds/faculty carry brief cases.

Eventually a book reader will not contain downloaded books. It will only access student-rented books from one or two sources. One source might be an on-campus library server. Backup servers might be available from publishers or from distributors like Amazon. That eliminates much of the risk of loss of purchased books stored on a Kindle. A book reader might have computing and note storage drives.

Along fraternity/sorority row back at Iowa State University years ago, the only accepted way to go to class was for fraternity men to carry a book and clipboard on the opposite side from where a slide rule dangled from a belt. Sorority women carried the clip board, book, and slide rule pressed to their chests. Eventually students will be able to carry a Kindle that replaces all this on their hips or chests. They won’t have to rush back to the fraternities and sororities between classes just to change books.

Of course students today use back packs. I’m so old that I don’t recall seeing a single fellow student at Iowa State University wearing a back pack. In the rain, students usually wrapped their book and clipboard in plastic. If you had two classes in a row, it was acceptable to carry two books and a clipboard. More than two books turned you into a nerd.

Question
What are the analogies that led to the names "Amazon" and "Kindle?"

Answer
The word "Amazon" depicts an enormous river of books (an now millions of products) flowing into the world.
The word "Kindle" depicts lighting a fire to read or wanting to read.

"Amazon’s New Kindle Is Faster, Smarter, Thinner," by Brad Stone and Motoko Rich, The New York Times, February 9, 2009 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/technology/personaltech/10kindle.html?ref=business

Escalating its efforts to dominate the fledgling industry for electronic books, Amazon introduced a new version of its electronic book reader today, dubbed Kindle 2.

Amazon said the upgraded device has seven times the memory as the original version, allows faster page-turns and has a crisper, though still black-and-white, display. The Kindle 2 also features a new design with round keys and a short, joystick-like controller — a departure from the design aspects of the previous version, which some buyers had criticized as awkward. The new device will ship on Feb. 24. Amazon did not change the price for the device, which remains $359.

Though the improvements to the Kindle are only incremental, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, defined some ambitious goals for the device. “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds,” he said at a news conference in New York.

Amazon introduced several new features for the Kindle. A new text-to-speech function allows readers to switch between reading words on the device and having the words read to them by a computerized voice. That technology was provided by Nuance, a speech-recognition company based in Burlington, Mass.

Amazon is also allowing Kindle owners to transfer texts between their Kindle and other mobile devices. Amazon said it is working on making digital texts available for other gadgets (such as mobile phones), though it did not specify which ones.

One competitive threat Amazon is facing in its effort to dominate the world of e-books is from Google, which has scanned in some seven million books, many of them out of print. Google has also struck deals with publishers and authors to split the proceeds from the online sales of those texts.

Google recently said it would soon begin selling these books for reading on mobile devices like Apple’s iPhone and phones running Google’s Android operating system.

Implicitly addressing the threat posed by Google, Mr. Bezos said that Amazon knows better than other companies what book-buyers wants and stressed Amazon’s digital catalog of 230,000 newer books and best-sellers.

“We have tens of millions of customers who buy books from us every day and we know what they want to read,” he said. “And we are making sure to prioritize those items.”

Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books and a unit of Bertelsmann of Germany, said the company was working with Amazon and other e-book makers to digitize its so-called backlist of older titles. When asked in an interview after the news conference if he was concerned about the effects of Amazon’s dominance in the e-book market, Mr. Dohle paused and laughed.

“It is not up to us to talk about Amazon’s competition,” he said. “I don’t think that any kind of defensive business strategy will succeed. We want to grow our business in all channels and one of the fastest growing customers is Amazon in all areas.”

“We see the Kindle and we see e-books as a real opportunity because we think that it will not cannibalize the physical part of the business and it will also generate and create new readers of books,” Mr. Dohle said.

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

Amazon Plans to Market Its E-Book Reader to Colleges
Amazon is considering entering the student textbook market with a new version of its Kindle e-book reader, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Most publishers now offer electronic versions of their textbooks, but so far there's not an attractive enough e-book reader, and Amazon aims to fill that void. The college-oriented new model might be larger and include student-friendly features, such as allowing making annotations, according to a technology blog. Amazon officers also said the high Kindle sales estimates calculated by TechCrunch--a popular blog on internet products and companies--are not accurate. But the electronic company refuses to make public how many e-book reader units it has sold since Kindle was launched last November.
Maria José Viñas, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3268&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

"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

Hard Copy versus Electronic Textbooks

September 1, 2008 message from Steve Doster [sdoster@SHAWNEE.EDU]

I’ve considered having my students purchase electronic versions of textbooks, but I think even with a laptop the net cost of electronic texts probably exceeds conventional textbooks for at least 3 reasons.

· Students often purchase used textbooks.

· Many students resell their used textbooks upon completion of the course.

· Printing out hard copy of selected portions of the text, which most students will probably do at one time or another, adds toner and paper costs.

Steve

September 2, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Steve,

I agree with every one of your points. As an instructor, however, I would also consider the following:
 

• For years, before my retirement, I used the Murthy and Groomer electronic textbook for AIS that students downloaded inexpensively ----
  https://www.cybertext.com/
  This had many added features such as weekly online quizzes that were graded by the publisher (Cybertext) with results passed on to me. Each week a student received a new partner to monitor quiz taking --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5342/attest.htm
  Quizzes generally accounted for about 10% of the grade and made it necessary for students to keep up with the lessons week-to-week. I never had a single complaint about the M&G text or the online quizzes. A few students downloaded the hard copy for an added fee, but most did not need the hard copy. It helped that it was such a great book in terms of contents. My last course syllabus is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5342/acct5342.htm#Preliminary1
   
• Electronic versions are much easier to search and generally permit margin notations that can also be searched. This is especially handy in open book examinations. I generally gave open book examinations before I retired from teaching. Students wasted a lot of exam time fumbling through hard copy pages.
   
• Textbooks, especially new editions, generally contain a lot of errors. Electronic textbooks can often be updated with ease from publisher Websites.
   
• Textbooks seem to grow larger and heavier with each new edition such that carrying three in a backpack each day is a burden that spine surgeons love, especially when students bear the weight asymmetrically on only one shoulder.
   
• Electronic versions often accompany college requirements to own laptops with wireless connections anywhere on campus. This has countless advantages for many purposes, especially electronic communications with other students and instructors. Also students can link easily to student guides at publisher Websites.
   
• If you really want students to save money, there are some pretty good free online textbooks, videos, and tutorials in accounting --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
  Scroll down past the economics items to get to the accounting items.
  One problem with the transition to IFRS is that there will initially be fewer free financial accounting textbooks. I suspect there will also be fewer IFRS-based videos and tutorials during the early years of IFRS in the U.S. However, I was contacted recently by a grant-funded operation that is developing new free IFRS-based textbooks to be made available worldwide. In other words, a student in Kenya or a student in Dayton, OH will soon be able to download newly-written accounting and other business textbooks. Note that nations in Africa do not have to have cable connections to download materials in this era of satellite coverage. Laptops are now being distributed free to millions of the poorest children of the world.

Bob Jensen

"Random House to digitize thousands of books," The Washington Post, November 24, 2008 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/24/AR2008112400652.html?wpisrc=newsletter

With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc. announced Monday that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the "Magic Treehouse" children's series.

Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in a statement that "more people everyday are enjoying reading in the electronic format and Random House wants to extend our reach to them with more of our books."

The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format and will have a digital library of nearly 15,000. The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months; excerpts can be viewed online through the publisher's Insight browsing service.

With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc. announced Monday that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the "Magic Treehouse" children's series.

Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in a statement that "more people everyday are enjoying reading in the electronic format and Random House wants to extend our reach to them with more of our books."

The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format and will have a digital library of nearly 15,000. The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months; excerpts can be viewed online through the publisher's Insight browsing service.

Free Electronic Literature --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

An Oligopoly
To say they have to be is an understatement. The General Accounting Office says textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation since 1986.

"Textbooks for Tightwads:  As classes start, business students are in for a shock: Textbook prices are higher than ever. A word to the wise: It pays to shop around," by Rachel Z. Arndt, Business Week, August 26, 2009 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/aug2009/bs20090826_069900.htm?link_position=link1

Shopping for textbooks can be burdensome at best, painful at worst. And it's no different for business students. By the time students get to B-school, they're probably well-versed in the tricks of the textbook trade. They need to be, with some books required at top B-schools retailing for well over $200.

Although textbook shopping is as inevitable as picking classes or group projects, spending tons of money on books doesn't have to be part of the process. The catch is knowing what you're doing, which isn't as obvious as it sounds, even for students with top-of-the-line spreadsheet skills. Of course, you can still look for the least beat-up copy in the campus bookstore, but that should be just the beginning.

The Web is overflowing with sites claiming to offer the cheapest textbooks around. So, with book prices rising, the cost of higher education higher than ever, and a dreary economy to boot, it'll certainly pay off to spend some time shopping around. Publishers may be resourceful, but students are, too.

An Oligopoly
To say they have to be is an understatement. The General Accounting Office says textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation since 1986. And today, students spend on average about $700 per year on required course materials, according to a 2008 survey by the National Association of College Stores (NACS).

Part of the problem is rising production costs, but the textbook market itself plays a role. The industry is an oligopoly, says James V. Koch, president of Old Dominion University, in a 2006 report by the U.S. Education Dept. Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. According to Koch, five publishers—Thomson, Wiley, Houghton-Mifflin, Pearson, and The McGraw-Hill Companies (Businessweek's parent)—control the market, putting out about 80% of all college texts.

What's more, Koch says, the textbook market is unique. Unlike markets for most consumer products, where demand is generated by consumers themselves, textbook demand is created by another group: the faculty choosing texts for their classes. That makes it possible for publishers to introduce higher prices without much&mdashlif any—loss in revenue.

Publishers can also introduce "bundled" versions of books—books sealed with additional CD-ROMs or other materials—for higher prices. This means, even if just the book itself is required, students are stuck buying a more expensive version.

Tricks of the Trade
But the situation for students isn't as dire as it sounds. First of all, as some economists point out, students are smart and know how to consume. Yes, textbooks are expensive. But they are expensive at list price—usually the highest price a student can find. The prices charged by most bookstores, online retailers, and even online trading posts are well under this publisher-set price.

As BusinessWeek found out, those retail prices can vary wildly, which is why it pays to shop around. One of the easiest and fastest ways to find the best prices is to use a site that aggregates prices from many retailers. Booksprice.com and allbookstores.com are good places to start. They both list prices from the most popular Web retailers, such as alibris.com, half.com, bookbyte.com, and even Amazon.com. If aggregated searches aren't turning up the results you want, you can go to individual retailers' sites. Make sure to know the edition, author, and publisher of the book you're looking for—some books, on topics such as microeconomics, share the same title for completely different products.

Expect some surprises. Sometimes a retailer will sell the new version of a textbook for much less than a used copy. Abebooks, for example, charges $69.99 for a new copy of Jonathan Berk's and Peter DeMarzo's Corporate Finance and $120.54 for a used one. It's unclear why this happens, but one possibility might be that the owners of the used books simply overpriced their product.

Continued in article

How to find the cheapest college textbooks ---
http://www.wisebread.com/how-to-find-the-cheapest-college-textbooks

I’m not in college any more, thank goodness, but I remember every penny-pinching moment. Some days I hardly had enough money for food, mainly because the materials and textbooks I had to buy ripped a hole in my pocket the size of the Grand Canyon. And so I’m always on the lookout for ways to help out college students. Today, I found two.

There are numerous methods available to search for textbooks, including the ever-popular “shopping” search option in Google. But if you want to go deeper, a few of my favorite sites in the past have included:

Abebooks.com
Addall.com
Amazon.com
Alibris.com
Craigslist.org
Bizrate.com
Half.com (which is part of eBay)
Textbooksnow.com

No doubt you’ve used one or two of these already. But it’s a pain to search each one and compare results. Usually, you find the book you want, ponder the price and then pay. Not good enough for me. I want to help students, who are suffering like the rest of us in this hellish economy, to get the absolute rock-bottom price on any book they’re looking for.

So I did a little more hunting around and found some much more powerful search engines, devoted to scouring multiple books sources at once. The two I like the most are CAMPUSBOOKS.COM and BIGWORDS.COM. And they really are the ultimate search engines for books, especially textbooks.

All you need to know are a few basics about the book you’re searching for. The easiest way is to have the ISBN number readily at hand. If that’s not available, you can search by keyword, author, title, the usual search engine options. And as you can see, the results from both sites are impressive. Here are two searches I did for an advertising book I love called “Hey Whipple, Squeeze This.”

Community College Open-Textbook Project G
Especially note the open sharing sources being used

The Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week with a member meeting in California," by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 29, 2008 --- Click Here

At the meeting, representatives of institutions around the country will start reviewing open-textbook models for “quality, usability, accessibility, and sustainability,” according to a news release. They will initially review four providers of free online educational resources: Connexions, run by Rice University; Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital-textbook publisher that will begin offering free textbooks online next year; the University of California’s UC College Prep Online, which offers Advanced Placement and other courses online; and the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College.

One of the most popular sites for textbooks is Bigwords --- http://www.bigwords.com/
Be careful, however, when buying cheaper foreign editions such as European editions of popular textbooks. There are often differences to be aware of such as different orderings of chapters.

One of the first places to start is to look for used books on Amazon.com and bn.com
I like buying from Amazon in order to reduce the number of online vendors that have my credit card numbers. Also Amazon guarantees delivery of used books and other merchandise from linked vendors.

We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?," by Miguel Helft, The New York Times, July 4, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/business/05ping.html?hpw

Cengage Learning said Thursday that it would become the first higher education publisher to let students rent as well as buy print textbooks directly from the source. Cengage said it would transform its existing online platform, known as iChapters, into a broader site that would allow students to rent print textbooks at 40 to 70 percent off retail as well as purchase print and digital texts and other materials. Publishers have been exploring a range of ways to enter the burgeoning market for renting textbooks.
Inside Higher Ed, August 14, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/14/qt#205700

Jensen Test:
Rent Textbooks from Chegg --- http://www.chegg.com/
Rental prices are about half the so-called purchase price of a new book.
Buying a used book is probably a better idea since it, in turn, can be sold back into the used market.

Intermediate Accounting ISBN 0470374942 by Kieso et al.
New (Chegg claims the new price is $209 but the price of hardcover is $177 at Barnes & Noble )
            The Amazon Price of a new hardcover is $168 --- Click Here
Bigwords.com (international edition that differs somewhat in chapter orderings) lists a price of $53.98
Used prices start at Amazon for about $159 (but watch carefully for the edition number)
Rent from Chegg ($96.53) --- http://www.chegg.com/details/intermediate-accounting/0470374942/

Jensen Comment
To get value for my money, I prefer used houses, cars, and books.
Of course, both Amazon and Google are now selling electronic versions of textbooks. For Amazon you must have a Kindle reader. For Google, all you have to have is a computer, although to date Amazon has a wider selection of textbooks available.

American Council of the Blind filed a lawsuit last month against Arizona State University, saying that its plan to use the Kindle to distribute books to students is illegal because blind people cannot use the device as currently configured ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/06/kindle 

March 25, 2009 message from Ramsey, Donald [dramsey@UDC.EDU]

The cost accounting book I'm using retails for $190.30. I see on a textbook search website called Bigwords.com that no less than 9 large dealers are offering it at under $50 for a new copy, including shipping. How can this be possible?

My concern would be how to get the word to students early enough so they could (1) not buy books at retail, and (2) get delivery in time for the first assignment.

Cheers,

Don

March 25, reply from Zane Swanson [ZSwanson@UCO.EDU]

Convince your university/college/department to go completely electronic (like Kindle) and the pricing problem would be gone. This recession may well drive some cost-sensitive programs to go to electronic books looking for a comparative advantage or a means of covering a budgetary shortfall. The tipping point will center around the trade-off costs of the campus book store versus outsourcing the textbooks electronically.

Zane Swanson

Jensen Added Comment
Universities that are promoting Kindle are running into some resistance from sight-impaired students. Although Kindle benefits some sight-impaired students by being able to enlarge fonts, the issue is one of access to Kindle readers and access to audio versions of the text. Many publishers have audio versions restricted to sight-impaired students. To avoid conflicts with sight impaired students, universities might have to offer audio versions to sight-impaired students at deals as good as Kindle deals to other students.

The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind filed a lawsuit last month against Arizona State University, saying that its plan to use the Kindle to distribute books to students is illegal because blind people cannot use the device as currently configured --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/06/kindle

PS
I noticed that Bigwords.com is also selling solutions manuals --- Click Here
http://www5.bigwords.com/search/?z=easysearch&searchtype=ISBN&searchstring=Kieso&Go.x=36&Go.y=28

"Textbooks Offered for iPod, iPhones CourseSmart Applications Will Let Students Access 7,000-Plus Titles," by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124985423101217817.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

A provider of subscription e-textbooks for college students is making its 7,000-plus titles accessible on Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iPod Touch as interest heats up in the digital-textbook arena.

The new applications, free for subscribers to CourseSmart LLC, will let students access their full electronic textbooks, read their digital notes and search for specific words and phrases.

"Nobody is going to use their iPhone to do their homework, but this does provide real mobile learning," said Frank Lyman, CourseSmart's executive vice president. "If you're in a study group and you have a question, you can immediately access your text."

The move comes as Amazon.com Inc. is shipping its $489 large-screen Kindle DX e-reader, which is aimed in part at college students. Amazon is overseeing a DX pilot program at seven colleges this fall involving hundreds of students who will experiment with reading textbooks digitally. Last week, McGraw-Hill Education, a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos., said it is making about 100 college textbooks available for use on Amazon's Kindle and Kindle DX.

CourseSmart's titles aren't available on either Amazon device. Mr. Lyman said he would like to see his books available wherever college students want them but that the two companies haven't yet had any conversations.

CourseSmart, which was created in 2007 as a joint venture of six higher-education publishers, including McGraw-Hill Education and Pearson PLC's Pearson Education, operates on a subscription model. Typically students rent a book for 180 days; when their subscription expires, they lose access to the title.

The company, which doesn't release financial results, offers its digital books at about 50% of the retail price of the corresponding physical textbook. Although students can't resell their e-textbooks, Mr. Lyman said they typically don't get more than 50% of what they paid for a new book when they resell it.

"Textbooks are the missing link in the e-reader content base," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research, Inc. "The problem so far is that college students haven't really been interested in reading on their laptops. The iPhone will help create excitement and generate awareness of e-textbooks."

Mr. Lyman said he believes that lack of awareness has been the largest barrier to students trying e-textbooks.

Albert N. Greco, a professor at the Fordham Graduate School of Business Administration who studies the book industry, estimates that sales of printed college textbook this year will reach $5.02 billion, up 3.5% from last year. He expects college e-textbooks to hit $117.5 million in sales in 2009, up 10.3%. "Once the recession ends, we will see a major, national push to make all higher education textbooks available in digital formats, as well as a move in that direction for high-school textbooks," Mr. Greco said.

Jensen Comment
I am truly amazed at the large number of accounting textbook listings, far more than are available on Kindle or Google eBooks. Perhaps this is because books are more difficult to copy books not actually stored on iPods and iPhones. Many of the books have 2008 and 2009 copyrights such that these are not obsolete editions. I cannot, however, even imagine reading textbooks on such small screens. Also the subscription prices seem quite high.

Instructors can request examination copies. For example, enter "Accounting" into the Instructor's search box at http://www.coursesmart.com/

August 16, 2009 reply from Gerald Trites [gtrites@ZORBA.CA]

Bob,

I think the best way for us as academics to help students with the textbook pricing problem is to self publish our books. Since we publish the textbooks, we have some control over that in the longer term, and for those who have not yet published a text, it could be done in the shorter term.

The current publishing indistry is an anachronism that survives only through their marketing system, the entrenched habits of writers, the fixed long term contracts that they cannot get out of, and the residual attachment of some prestige (arguably falsely grounded) to the traditional publications means as opposed to self publishing To use my book as a comparison, it sells for $125 per copy. The royalty is 20% of net sales. Lets ignore the net aspect for the moment. That means a royalty of $25 per copy. If I were to publish this same book through LuLu, for example, the "royalty" would be 80%, which means I could sell the same book for $31.25 and make the same $25 each. If I were to sell it through Booksurge, which has some marketing capability through Amazon and other online outlets,  the royalty would be 35%, so the same book could be priced at $72 to make the 25 each. The fly in the ointment is that LuLu has no marketing arm cruising around the universities selling the books or displaying them at conferences. However, if we academics made a little adjustment in our buying choices, and checked out sources like LuLu, we could make a difference. It's really all in our hands.

If I could get out of my existing contract, which I can't, I would love to move it over to LuLu or Booksurge or an equivalent. I'd price the book at 19.95, giving the students a break and still getting back some reward for my efforts. I would also have more control over my book and could still get it reviewed by colleagues. If I ever write another textbook, it will definitely be done that way.

We could change our ways and make life a little easier for the students if we really wanted to.

 Jerry

__________________________
Phone - 416-602-3931
Website - www.zorba.ca
Blog - www.zorba.ca/blog.html

August 19, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Jerry,

The issue lies in what one expects from a textbook. I seldom cared much about the text part itself, because I usually thought I had better text in my course notes, my videos, and my Websites.

But I almost always assigned a textbook, and the reason was almost always to provide students with problems, cases, and other assignments. It just took too much of my time to develop the end-of-chapter stuff (complete with an answer book) for my own materials. For example, I think one of the best textbooks ever written was the one I assigned repeatedly for my accounting theory course (where I did not assign accounting theory textbooks):

Derivatives: An Introduction (Hardcover)

by Robert A. Strong

Robert A. Strong (Author)

Before my students could begin to comprehend FAS 133 and IAS 39, they had to understand derivatives. I can, and did, explain derivatives in class. But I could not find the time to develop assignment material like that found in Strong’s textbook. Nor could I teach some of the hedging strategies developed by Strong in that book.

I might add that one of the huge problems in free textbooks is the loss of incentive to update the end-of-chapter stuff that, in many cases, is not even written by the textbook authors. Publishers often outsource the end-of-chapter stuff, and with a free textbook there’s no longer any incentive to pay a lot of money for updating the end-of-chapter material so vital to a textbook.

Of course there are many textbook revisions that badly suffer from having updated the chapters without updating the end-of-chapter material or only superficially updating what’s at the end of the chapter.

When a publisher’s rep sent me a new edition of a textbook to examine, the first thing I always did is compare the ends of chapters between the old and the new editions if I was seriously contemplating an adoption of the new edition.  I figure that the revision is a cheapie if it does not significantly revise what’s at the end of the chapters.

 Bob Jensen

Free online textbooks, cases, and videos ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

Teaching Without Textbooks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#NoTextbooks

Bob Jensen's threads on technologies for aiding handicapped learners --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm

Now students and faculty can print at high speeds their own copies of many books found in the library

Millions upon millions of literature and scientific classics are now available free online --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Most can be printed as well as read online.

But in specialized fields like accountancy, our classics are seldom available online. Now it is possible for our colleges to print hard copies of virtually any classic or other book where there are no copyright restrictions at a clip of about 15 minutes per book. This allows educators such as accounting educators to adopt supplementary books for courses at reasonable prices.

First watch the Expresso Book Machine Video --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMFh5axDKWU

Then read about the Expresso Book Machine --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso_Book_Machine

The New York Public Library put the first Expresso Book Machine into operation ---
http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/21/new-york-public-library-gets-first-espresso-book-machine/

"New Machines Reproduce Custom Books on Demand," by Lisa Guernsey, Inside Higher Ed, December 5, 2008 ---  http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i15/15a00103.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

If you wonder what the future of book publishing might look, smell, and sound like, head north to the University of Alberta's bookstore in Edmonton. There a $144,000 machine is churning out made-to-order paperbacks at a cost of a penny a page.

It's the Espresso Book Machine, which converts digital files into bound books, one order at a time, in under 15 minutes. The contraption smells like glue, looks like a couple of copy machines attached to a cabinet, and emits its share of clunking and thunking sounds, said Jacqui Wong, the machine's operator, who calls it her "baby."

At least seven Espressos are in operation, several on college campuses. Instead of publishers' printing thousands of books and hoping some of them will find buyers — and losing money when they don't — the machine prints on demand. Customers can submit an order for, say, an old textbook or a copy of a 19th-century classic, and walk out with it several minutes later.

But the machine has limitations. It cannot print just any book. Copyright law limits the books that can be offered, the texts must be PDF's, and it can take days to get a repairman when something breaks.

The company behind the device is called On Demand Books. Founded in 2003, On Demand is the brainchild of Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House, who saw the machine's prototype in 1999 in a warehouse in St. Louis, where it was built by the inventor Jeff Marsh. The company's chief executive is Dane Neller, former chief executive of the gourmet food distributor Dean & Deluca.

"Our business proposition is to make books available anywhere, in any language, immediately," Mr. Neller says.

Todd Anderson, the University of Alberta's bookstore manager, says "tens of thousands" of books have been printed since the machine arrived last November.

He says orders come from multiple sources: Some professors order out-of-print textbooks to keep costs low for students. Others order classics, scanned with their own handwritten notes in the margins. Some customers want bound copies of book sections, like the first 10 chapters of a 20-chapter book. Hobbyists make custom books for gifts. A science-fiction writer used it to self-publish his first novel.

"I get calls on this every day," says Mr. Anderson, who adds that revenue is streaming in. "It's a symbol for change."

He can print an 800-page, out-of-print chemistry textbook for $18, he said, and sell it for $37, making a tidy profit. (Yet the price is well below what the text would cost elsewhere.) Mr. Anderson said he has already run off and sold tens of thousands of books, earning well over the cost of the machine.

Laws and Repairs

In addition to the technical restrictions, however, U.S. copyright regulations require that books be in the public domain (which includes anything printed before 1922), or that the copyright holder must grant permission for reprinting. Canadian law offers more avenues for reproduction under copyright, which may explain why two Canadian universities — Alberta and McMaster University, in Ontario — are among the sites using the machine. Printers in Canada must pay a royalty fee of no more than $10 for each copy of an out-of-print book, Mr. Anderson says. The law requires books in print to carry a royalty of no more than 10.3 cents per page.

The machine is not immune to glitches that come with human error and the wearing down of mechanical parts.

The University of Michigan Library bought one this summer with alumni donations and started using it in October, within a few steps of Shapiro Library's coffee shop. But the machine has been shut down twice for repairs. Several dozen requests have come in, but only a few have been fulfilled so far, says Terri Geitgey, the digital-projects librarian who is taking the orders.

Because so few people know how to repair it, waits for service can take several days, says Maria Bonn, the library's director of scholarly publishing. But she emphasizes that On Demand Books has been "very responsive."

Mr. Neller explained the Michigan glitches. "It was a programming error and one of the cutting sticks was misaligned," he says, adding that version 2.0, which became available this month, incorporates a Xerox machine that can be repaired, or unjammed, by anyone with Xerox training. The new machine is also more compact, with dimensions similar to those of a large copy machine.

The Michigan library may be in a prime position to produce public-domain books. It is part of the HathiTrust, a recently announced repository of two million digitized books shared among the universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (which includes the Big Ten research universities), the University of California's campuses, and the University of Virginia.

Printing Books at the Library

"We'd like to get to a point where, when you are looking through the catalog, you see three options for each book," Ms. Bonn says. "Do you want to check it out? Do you want to view it online? Or do you want to buy your own copy?" Michigan's prices are $6 for a book under 16 pages and $10 for a longer one.

It might sound strange for a library to be printing and selling books, but Ms. Bonn says the library's goal is no different than it always has been: making books accessible.

The lines between publishers, printers, bookshops and libraries were already blurring. With the book machine, they may be scrambled up, too. At Alberta, for example, Mr. Anderson expected to be printing mostly course packs and was surprised to find that self-publishers have been among his most frequent customers.

Now, with the machine hitting its first birthday, Mr. Anderson is considering buying a second one. "It paid for itself in 11 months," he says.

Free Electronic Literature --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

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

Free online tutorials, videos, and other learning aids in various disciplines --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials

Links to other open sharing sites --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

eBook Publishing Platform
ebrary --- http://www.ebrary.com/corp/

ebrary® is a leading e-content services and technology provider that has been serving the library, publishing, and corporate markets since 1999.

More than 1,400 customers around the world serving more than 12.5 million end-users use the ebrary platform to acquire e-content from leading publishers as well as distribute their own PDF content online.

"Duke U. Press Rolls Out Online Access to Its Books," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 10, 2008 --- Click Here

Libraries can now sign up to buy access to all of Duke University Press’s latest offerings in electronic form through the just-launched e-Duke Books Scholarly Program. The program operates via ebrary, a widely used online content provider.

Duke publishes about 115 books a year in the social sciences and humanities, according to Michael McCullough, the press’s sales manager. Subscribers to e-Duke Books will have online access to all those and to all backlist titles available in electronic format — 900 and counting. Although many university presses have partnerships with ebrary, Mr. McCullough said he believed that Duke’s program is unique because it offers access to the press’s full list, not just to individual titles.

Scholarly presses, including Duke’s, have watched hardcover library sales slide. The e-Duke program is “a sort of long-range response to the decline in sales of cloth monographs,” Mr. McCullough told the Chronicle.

“We know that, increasingly, library resources are moving toward electronic products rather than print books, and we want to make sure that we’re participating in that in a way that’s as beneficial to libraries and us as possible,” he said.

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.

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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 

Book Readers versus Hard Copy Textbooks

Much still depends upon the textbook publishers.

The ideal for Kindle is where virtually all textbook publishers have Kindle versions. Then for every semester all the required textbooks in all courses can loaded onto Kindle. Gone are the heavy backpacks. The savings to students across the years will depend upon how much discount is obtained on Kindle versions relative to used hard copy prices.

It’s inevitable that the day will come when hard copy will no longer be an option because of hard copy printing costs, inventory carrying costs, logistical costs of shipping to stores or retail customers, and the costs of buying back unsold copies from the stores. The question is when this day will arrive. My guess is that we are at least ten years or more away from that point in time. Between now and 2020, book readers will improve greatly just like laptop computers improved greatly between 1995 and 2009.

Students gain the immense advantage of Kindle’s word search. Students lose all the comfort and other traditional benefits of curling up in bed or chair with a book.

There is much more risk with a Kindle. If a student loses a book or has a book stolen it’s one book. If a Kindle is stolen it can be the loss of all of a semester’s textbooks. There’s also the risk that Kindle needs to be repaired. I might say Kindle becomes kindle that goes up in smoke, but that’s probably going a bit too far. Eventually there might be local repair/replacement shops for Kindles, but that day is way off into the future.

In ideal circumstances, students should be able to submit police reports to publishers or Amazon for free replacement downloads in a replacement Kindle. Perhaps the Kindle licensed repair shops of the future will be able to download free replacement books.

Can you imagine 12 students coming ten days before the final exam and reporting that their Kindles were stolen? In the past I’ve carried a few extra textbooks for the occasional circumstance where a student needs to borrow a book for a few days. Textbook reps usually supplied me with a few copies for such purposes, but with Kindle the textbook rep will eventually be out of the picture, especially when publishers cease to publish hard copy textbooks.

I personally think the risk of dependency on a Kindle is too high until publishers and/or Amazon take away the worst risks. One possibility would be to sell a backup hard drive that will only work with a given Kindle or replacement Kindle. Then a student who must replace a Kindle could get the secret password to download from the hard drive into the replacement Kindle.

I’ve not yet purchased a Kindle and am waiting for some improvements like multimedia and computing capabilities. But if I were a student today given a choice between hard copy and a Kindle version, I would go for the hard copy every time in spite of putting my spine at risk with a heavy backpack. I guess only nerds/faculty carry brief cases.

Eventually a book reader will not contain downloaded books. It will only access student-rented books from one or two sources. One source might be an on-campus library server. Backup servers might be available from publishers or from distributors like Amazon. That eliminates much of the risk of loss of purchased books stored on a Kindle. A book reader might have computing and note storage drives.

Along fraternity/sorority row back at Iowa State University years ago, the only accepted way to go to class was for fraternity men to carry a book and clipboard on the opposite side from where a slide rule dangled from a belt. Sorority women carried the clip board, book, and slide rule pressed to their chests. Eventually students will be able to carry a Kindle that replaces all this on their hips or chests. They won’t have to rush back to the fraternities and sororities between classes just to change books.

Of course students today use back packs. I’m so old that I don’t recall seeing a single fellow student at Iowa State University wearing a back pack. In the rain, students usually wrapped their book and clipboard in plastic. If you had two classes in a row, it was acceptable to carry two books and a clipboard. More than two books turned you into a nerd.

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

Bob Jensen's history of book authoring, course authoring, and course management technology --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm

Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

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 been replaced by electronic ones. Students in the experimental course were lent hand-held computers loaded with several assigned textbooks, as well as electronic versions of every warrant, indictment, and deposition from the trials.

The course was designed to take advantage of two of the most celebrated features of digital textbooks -- their capacity to hold reams of data and their ability to let readers easily search for any word or phrase. In the classroom, students became on-the-spot historians, using the gadgets to home in on court documents so they could argue for and against various interpretations of what happened in Salem, Mass., more than 300 years ago.

Many futurists have predicted the death of the book, but the printed word has proven extremely difficult to replicate electronically in a form that is as elegant and easy to read as text on paper. A pilot project here this spring, comprising two courses, attempted to see whether the latest e-book technologies could allow entire courses to go bookless.

During class sessions, students tapping on tiny screens with plastic styluses looked more as if they were taking scientific readings than discussing history and religion. The setting was decidedly old-fashioned, though; the class met in one of the few classrooms remaining from Jefferson's "academical village."

"Whenever we got to talking about something in a document, we would just go to the document," says Amy Nichols, a senior who took the course. The students say they used court records and other texts more than they would have with bulky printed versions of the same documents.

What's more, the students were bolder than usual in criticizing scholarly summaries of events presented in their textbooks, says Benjamin C. Ray, the religious-studies professor teaching the course. In fact, they were often too quick to dispute scholarly accounts once they came upon source material that seemed to contradict the textbook, he says. "I think they're going overboard. They're trashing too much ... without knowing the historical methods."

For their part, the students quickly discovered disadvantages of the high-tech texts. Unlike paper books, e-books sometimes crash. Several students lost marginal notes and bookmarks when their hand-held computers suddenly erased their data.

Some students said reading from the tiny screens made the texts seem more fragmented. "When I'm at home sitting on my chair curled up with the afghan on my lap, I don't want to be flipping through this," says Kristen Buckstad, a student in the course, holding up her Hewlett-Packard Journada, which sells for about $450. The hand-held device is roughly the size of a Palm Pilot, with a 2½-by-3¼-inch color screen and enough memory to store about 90 books. "The screen is too small," she says. "It's hard to get the overall feeling of the flow of the narrative."

For the rest of the article, go to http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i36/36a03901.htm 

"Are We Headed Toward the Bookless Campus?" The New York Times, May 18, 2001 --- http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i36/36a03501.htm 

In the articles that follow, The Chronicle examines the possibilities of e-textbooks, the impact that e-books are having on academic libraries, and an experiment in teaching with e-texts using specialized reading devices.

• Publishers Promote E-Textbooks, but Many Students and Professors Are Skeptical
  
  
• Companies Find Academic Libraries a Key Target and a Tough Sell
  
  
• Academic E-Publishing: Some Key Players
  
  
• A University That Reveres Tradition Experiments With E-Books
  
  
• Author Says Libraries Shouldn't Abandon Paper
  

How many Microsoft Press books can you afford to buy? What if you could just pick the chapters you want from each book and make your own book of specialty advice and techniques? Now you can! http://www.accountingweb.com/item/51821 

WizeUp Electronic Textbooks 

From Syllabus e-News, Resources, and Trends August 14, 2001

Thomson Learning Offers eTextbooks this Fall

Course Technology, a computer education publishing division of Thomson Learning, is offering flexible textbook content electronically through eBooks. Course Technology will offer a library of more than 50 of their best-selling textbook titles within eBook platforms beginning in September 2001. Course Technology offers a secure system for accessing, annotating and sharing copyrighted content online through its partnership with Rovia. The Rovia-enabled etextbooks, which look exactly like the printed version, integrate the entire offering of materials that accompany a textbook, including interactive quizzes, movies and other multimedia enhancements, into a single platform. Professors and students can customize their content by annotating text, highlighting key passages, inserting "sticky notes," and bookmarking pages.

From Syllabus e-News, Resources, and Trends August 14, 2001

Atomic Dog Publishing Launches My Backpack 2.0

Atomic Dog Publishing, a Cincinnati-based higher education, online publisher, announced the release of its new online learning environment, MyBackpack 2.0, the platform upon which all of Atomic Dog's online textbooks are delivered. MyBackpack 2.0 presents textbooks in real-time, allowing for a higher level of customization, currency, and multimedia integration. The new learning environment features full text searching, pop-up glossary terms and footnotes, bookmarking, integrated study-guides, integrated video, audio, simulations, and animations, and a hyperlinked table of contents, in full and brief. MyBackpack 2.0 also enables students and instructors to customize their textbooks. Students can now enter personal notes and highlights within any of Atomic Dog's online textbooks. Instructors can also post notes, quizzes, Web exercises, alternative points of view, case studies, current events and critical thinking questions to their students. For more information, visit www.atomicdog.com .

An e-publisher selling versions of several significant books survives a day in court against Random House --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51022,00.html

"E-Books Out of Print Already?" by M.J. Rose, Wired News, June 4, 2001

See also:
What if E-Books Cost Less?
E-Book Forecast: Cloudy
Getting a Read on New E-Books

"The Premature Obituary of the Book:  Why Literature?" by Mario Vargas Llosa, The New Republic, May 14, 2001 --- http://www.thenewrepublic.com/051401/llosa051401.html 
This is a very long article.  Llosa's concluding remarks are are as follows:

So literature's unrealities, literature's lies, are also a precious vehicle for the knowledge of the most hidden of human realities. The truths that it reveals are not always flattering; and sometimes the image of ourselves that emerges in the mirror of novels and poems is the image of a monster. This happens when we read about the horrendous sexual butchery fantasized by de Sade, or the dark lacerations and brutal sacrifices that fill the cursed books of Sacher-Masoch and Bataille. At times the spectacle is so offensive and ferocious that it becomes irresistible. Yet the worst in these pages is not the blood, the humiliation, the abject love of torture; the worst is the discovery that this violence and this excess are not foreign to us, that they are a profound part of humanity. These monsters eager for transgression are hidden in the most intimate recesses of our being; and from the shadow where they live they seek a propitious occasion to manifest themselves, to impose the rule of unbridled desire that destroys rationality, community, and even existence. And it was not science that first ventured into these tenebrous places in the human mind, and discovered the destructive and the self-destructive potential that also shapes it. It was literature that made this discovery. A world without literature would be partly blind to these terrible depths, which we urgently need to see.

Uncivilized, barbarian, devoid of sensitivity and crude of speech, ignorant and instinctual, inept at passion and crude at love, this world without literature, this nightmare that I am delineating, would have as its principal traits conformism and the universal submission of humankind to power. In this sense, it would also be a purely animalistic world. Basic instincts would determine the daily practices of a life characterized by the struggle for survival, and the fear of the unknown, and the satisfaction of physical necessities. There would be no place for the spirit. In this world, moreover, the crushing monotony of living would be accompanied by the sinister shadow of pessimism, the feeling that human life is what it had to be and that it will always be thus, and that no one and nothing can change it.

When one imagines such a world, one is tempted to picture primitives in loincloths, the small magic-religious communities that live at the margins of modernity in Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. But I have a different failure in mind. The nightmare that I am warning about is the result not of under-development but of over-development. As a consequence of technology and our subservience to it, we may imagine a future society full of computer screens and speakers, and without books, or a society in which books--that is, works of literature--have become what alchemy became in the era of physics: an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media civilization by a neurotic minority. I am afraid that this cybernetic world, in spite of its prosperity and its power, its high standard of living and its scientific achievement would be profoundly uncivilized and utterly soulless--a resigned humanity of post-literary automatons who have abdicated freedom.

It is highly improbable, of course, that this macabre utopia will ever come about. The end of our story, the end of history, has not yet been written, and it is not pre-determined. What we will become depends entirely on our vision and our will. But if we wish to avoid the impoverishment of our imagination, and the disappearance of the precious dissatisfaction that refines our sensibility and teaches us to speak with eloquence and rigor, and the weakening of our freedom, then we must act. More precisely, we must read.

"The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World." by Clifford Lynch, First Monday,  vol. 6, no. 6, June 4 2001) --- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_6/lynch/index.html 

Commercial publishing interests are presenting the future of the book in the digital world through the promotion of e-book reading appliances and software. Implicit in this is a very complex and problematic agenda that re-establishes the book as a digital cultural artifact within a context of intellectual property rights management enforced by hardware and software systems. With the convergence of different types of content into a common digital bit-stream, developments in industries such as music are establishing precedents that may define our view of digital books. At the same time we find scholars exploring the ways in which the digital medium can enhance the traditional communication functions of the printed work, moving far beyond literal translations of the pages of printed books into the digital world. This paper examines competing visions for the future of the book in the digital environment, with particular attention to questions about the social implications of controls over intellectual property, such as continuity of cultural memory.

Contents 

• Introduction: Hyped Machines, Hidden Agendas and Visions of the Future 
• Defining Digital Books and E-book Readers 
• Digital Books as Literal Translations of Printed Books 
• New Content Genres: Reconceptualizing Books in a Digital World 
• Converting Older Books to Digital Form: The Search for Critical Mass 
• The Control of Digital Books: A Hidden Agenda with Massive Consequences 
• Cautionary Tales from Other Content Industries 
• Consumer Expectations and Technological Controls on Content 
• The Global Marketplace: Rights Management, Control, and Censorship 
• Books Are Not Music: Reframing the Debate About Control Over Content 
• Restructuring the Publishing Value Chain and the Publishing Industry 
• Assessing E-book Readers 
• The Role of Standards 
• A Brave New World for Readers 
• The Uncertain Future of Digital Books in Libraries 
• Continuity of Access and the Preservation of Our Intellectual Heritage 
• Defining the Future of the Book

Issues of preservation, continuity of access, and the integrity of our cultural and intellectual record are particularly critical in the context of e-book readers and the works designed for them. These have enormous importance both for individual consumers and for society as a whole, and for libraries, which manage much of the intellectual archives of our society. Most fundamentally, we face the question of whether libraries can continue to collect books as they move to digital form, particularly in mass-market publishing. We must not overlook these issues in our rush to adopt e-book readers and content distributed for them, and libraries will have a special obligation to speak out on these issues and to educate society about them, while also trying to work out viable arrangements with the content industries.

Finally, we must continue to recognize that digital books, in the broadest sense, are at least potentially much more than simply digital content translated from the print framework that can be viewed by e-book readers promoted by today's publishing establishment and technology providers as part of an agenda of market share, new revenue opportunities, or control over content. Digital books, in all of their complexity and potential, are as yet only dimly defined, and will be a continued focus for the creativity and ingenuity of present and future generations of authors, teachers and scholars.

I have argued at length here that the printed word, and particularly its manifestation in the book, holds a very special and privileged place in our culture and our society. As we think about the migration of authoring to the digital medium, the book - rather than other cultural products such as musical works - should be the benchmark against which we measure and test our assumptions and beliefs about the roles and uses of intellectual property in the new environment. We must remain mindful of this distinction, and not constrain the virtually unlimited potential of the digital medium to the traditions and business interests that have coalesced around the printed book over the centuries and that may now seek both to define a new canon of "book" in the digital world, regaining the control of the digital printing press that they suddenly lost with the creation of the World Wide Web, and to surround these new ebooks with new technology-enabled controls on content. We need to be careful not to prematurely marginalize any of the new genres the digital medium may enable. The most compelling case for ebooks as relatively literal of the printed book is based on greater convenience and ubiquity of access, and somewhat enhanced use. The case for digital books broadly, as new genres of works, is about more effective communication of ideas, enhanced teaching and learning, and renewed creativity. While the first case is a good one, if the price is not too high (in social as well as economic terms), the second case is truly compelling and inspiring. The future digital book will take us far beyond today's printed books and publishing industry, in many different and sometimes unexpected directions, though our points of departure will inevitably be an important influence. Let us welcome the journey and be open to many destinations; we will find treasures and wonderful surprises along the way

"The Next Chapter In Electronic Books," by Arik Hesseldahl, Forbes, April 26, 2004 --- http://www.forbes.com/personaltech/2004/04/26/cx_ah_0426tentech.html 

The electronic book is one of those technological concepts from the 1990s that seems somewhat of a leftover. It's never really taken off the way it potentially could: It makes so much sense.

Books--especially the great beefy ones worth reading--are bulky. Their size makes them inconvenient. And with all this electronic equipment we lug around--laptops, personal digital assistants and the like--there's no reason they couldn't be used to carry the text of books.

 

Last month, Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) and Royal Philips Electronics (nyse: PHG - news - people ) teamed with privately held E Ink to announce the Librié, which is set to go on sale in Japan this month. It looks a bit like a PDA but its display uses E Ink's electronic ink technology that it says offers a "paper-like" reading experience comparable to newsprint.

Getting the display's appearance just right has been a key problem in the evolution of the e-book concept. Paper is ideal for most eyes, electronic displays simply aren't. Paper requires no technical knowledge; electronic devices invariably include instruction manuals--printed on paper.

E Ink's electronic paper display is reflective and can be read in the sunlight and in conditions of dim light. It presents a resolution of 170 pixels per inch, similar to newspaper. The gadget uses four AAA batteries but only uses power when a page is turned and the image presented on the display changes. The companies say a user can turn 10,000 pages before those batteries have to be replaced.

The device itself is about the size of a paperback book and can store the contents of about 500 books at a time. And therein is the basic strength of the e-book. While information is increasingly available in digitized form, we're still using a lot of paper, still buying books and still carrying them around. Cramming all our reading into a light electronic device that is easy on the eyes makes sense for the reader as long as it's easy to use. If nothing else, it would reduce the size of carry-on luggage on long flights.

Last year, BarnesandNoble.com (nasdaq: BNBN - news - people ) stopped selling e-books for download from its Web site amid underwhelming sales. Also last year, Gemstar (nasdaq: GMST - news - people ) stopped selling its Softbook e-book devices and discontinued sales of e-book content.

If the e-book is going to be a hit, a few things have to happen. First there has to be a good selection of material to read, and, for publishers, that means taking the risk that their best titles may wind up being distributed for free on the Internet.

PDA users are already downloading books. Palmsource (nasdaq: PSRC - news - people ) sells e-books for use on handheld devices running the Palm operating system. Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack is available for download for $14.99. Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) also sells e-books for its Microsoft Reader software on PDAs running Windows Mobile. But last year the security on Microsoft's software was cracked.

The recording industry has struggled with this problem in ways both overt and subtle: It has sued batches of pirate downloaders but also circulated its own falsely labeled music files intended to frustrate and dissuade would-be pirates.

The right device--like an iPod from Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people )--coupled with a good music-download service--like Apple's iTunes Music Store--are proving to be a success. And while Apple has lately been chasing the creators of a software program called Playfair--which has defeated Apple's digital rights management scheme, dubbed Fairplay, and limits how music purchased from iTunes can be used--publishers learn a lot from the iTunes experience.

If Sony's new reading device turns out to be the iPod of electronic readers, then publishers will have to develop the reader's equivalent of iTunes.

"Academic Publishing in the Digital Realm: An Interview with Clifford Lynch," Syllabus, December 2002, pp.10-13 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6983 
Syllabus interviews Clifford A. Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).

CL: There are two rather separate things going on, that occasionally get jumbled together under the guise of electronic publishing even though they have rather different characteristics. On one side of the fence we see the changes in the traditional business of scholarly publishing—which includes the journals, monographs, and other kinds of materials that we are all familiar with—this is the incremental evolution of print publishing to the digital world.

On the other side, we have new works of digital authorship and truly new electronic publishing models. Here is where we see an investigation of the transformative potential of digital media. Both sides can be legitimately talked about as electronic scholarly communications, but often, discussions of scholarly publishing in the digital realm focus too narrowly on one side or the other.

S: Why don't we talk first about what's happening on the traditional scholarly publishing side—are we seeing a major movement toward electronic publication?

CL: These materials are moving on a large scale now, from print to digital form. But the conceptualization of the work is still very much rooted in print. Indeed, you will often see people printing these materials out in order to read them. So, rather than producing paper and shipping it to a library, what you'll see is a publisher setting up a Web site that people browse, reading some things online but printing out what they really want to study carefully.

This move to electronic publishing has happened largely with journals. It's happened to a lesser extent with books and monographs, the sorts of things that would be read in rather large chunks, in part because they are awkward to print out on demand for readers.

S: Are the authors of these materials creating different versions of their works digitally? What are the authority considerations?

CL: When you look at how people author for these kinds of works, they are mostly still writing things which could appear equally in digital or paper form. But it's interesting that journal publishers in particular take the position that the authoritative version is the digital version. I think that is an important intellectual step, but it's one that their authors have not entirely caught up with yet. Virtually all of these authors are still producing articles for which the digital and the print versions are essentially equivalent.

So, while the editorial decision that the digital version is definitive opens the door to things like interactive simulation models or datasets that can be navigated and analyzed by readers, in practice, the tradition of scholarly authorship is still very strongly based on a print model.

S: And what about indexes and reference materials?

CL: Indexing and abstracting services, encyclopedias, dictionaries—these things have a more natural existence in the digital world as databases, so they have really gone off on their own separate trajectory and are no longer particularly recognizable from their origins as printed volumes.

S: What about the publishers? Are there new business models?

CL: This move to digital formats has been driven primarily by the same groups who were the major players in the print publishing world. The scholarly societies, the university presses, and the commercial journal publishers—particularly in the scientific, technical, and medical areas.

Obviously there have been some perturbations in business models. For instance, we now typically see site licensing, particularly for journals, giving all members of an institutional community unlimited, concurrent access to that journal—rather than adhering to the convention in the print world, where a large institution would subscribe to multiple copies of a journal to house in different libraries around the campus. With site licensing, some publishers have moved to a pricing structure that figures in the size of the institution.

S: But this is really incremental progress on the traditional scholarly publishing side.

CL: That's what's happened with the traditional publishing industry so far. They are using electronic publishing as a way to disseminate and deliver, but generally, they are disseminating and delivering things that are rather strongly rooted in print. Note, however, that this is a generality. There are some experiments going on among these publishers—but they are mostly experiments rather than large-scale change.

S: Then let's talk about the other side—the new works of digital authorship and the newer electronic publishing models.

Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6983  

How to Find Electronic Books

Glossary of Book Collecting Terms --- http://hardyboys.bobfinnan.com/bookterms.htm 

Free Electronic Books --- http://www.awriteshop.com/e_reading.html 
Many of the books are scanned photographs of actual book pages.

Children's Books Online ---  http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/ 

Search for electronic books --- http://www.searchebooks.com/ 

Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/SUBJIN_A.HTM 

 Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/BIBLIO.HTM 

A great index of electronic journals (although admittedly not comprehensive)--- http://ejw.i8.com/ 

"HarperCollins Private Reserve Houses E-Books," T.H.E. Journal, April 2002, Page 26 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3964.cfm 

Book publisher HarperCollins and OverDrive have created HarperCollins Private Reserve, a digital warehouse for HarperCollins e-books worldwide. Using OverDrive servers and technology, HarperCollins Private Reserve allows the publishing company's divisions in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand to manage and distribute e-book titles and marketing information directly.

The warehouse supplies online retailers with e-book catalog information, and fulfills e-book purchases to their customers in Microsoft Reader and Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader formats. In addition, OverDrive's technology allows HarperCollins to use its growing e-book library to promote the sale of both print and electronic titles. For example, HarperCollins can now offer electronic review copies or e-books bundled with print titles. The initiative includes HarperCollins' e-book imprint, PerfectBound, and e-books from its Christian publishing group, Zondervan. HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, www.harpercollins.com .

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography ---  http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html 

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Most sources have been published between 1990 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1990 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet.

Announcements for new versions of the bibliography are distributed on PACS-P and other mailing lists.

An archive of prior versions of the bibliography is available.

Electronic Book Sources from the University of Illinois --- http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/People/rgrant/books.html 

Online Libraries --- http://www.pcs.cnu.edu/html/Libraries.html 

Classic Novels --- http://www.classic-novels.com/ebs.shtml 

Palm --- http://www.geocities.com/alauchlanredwoodgrove/redwoodgrove/palm.html 

A great index of electronic journals (although admittedly not comprehensive)--- http://www.emporia.edu/libsv/ejw/ 
Virtually every campus discipline is indexed.

Electronic Texta and Publishing Resources --- http://www.loc.gov/global/etext/etext.html 

Eye on Books (included photographs and audio) --- http://www.eyeonbooks.com/ 
Read and listen to reviews of top books --- separate the wheat from the chaff.

eBooks.com --- http://www.ebooks.com/ 

Children's & Educational (9 titles) Computing & Information Technology (8 titles) Earth Sciences, Geography, Environment, Planning (7 titles) Economics, Finance, Business & Industry (161 titles) Family, Home & Practical Interest (19 titles) Fiction (51 titles) Humanities (12 titles) Language, Literature & Biography (10 titles) Law (7 titles) Mathematics & Science (6 titles) Reference, Information & Interdisciplinary Subjects (15 titles) Social Sciences (22 titles) Sport, Travel, Leisure Interests & Tourism (5 titles) Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, Veterinary Science (1 title)

"HarperCollins Private Reserve Houses E-Books," T.H.E. Journal, April 2002, Page 26 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3964.cfm 

Book publisher HarperCollins and OverDrive have created HarperCollins Private Reserve, a digital warehouse for HarperCollins e-books worldwide. Using OverDrive servers and technology, HarperCollins Private Reserve allows the publishing company's divisions in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand to manage and distribute e-book titles and marketing information directly.

The warehouse supplies online retailers with e-book catalog information, and fulfills e-book purchases to their customers in Microsoft Reader and Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader formats. In addition, OverDrive's technology allows HarperCollins to use its growing e-book library to promote the sale of both print and electronic titles. For example, HarperCollins can now offer electronic review copies or e-books bundled with print titles. The initiative includes HarperCollins' e-book imprint, PerfectBound, and e-books from its Christian publishing group, Zondervan. HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, www.harpercollins.com .

The eBook store at Barnes & Noble--- http://ebooks.barnesandnoble.com/index.asp?userid=2OCW3SU9XZ 

BARNESANDNOBLE.COM, ADOBE TEAM UP ON E-BOOKS Barnesandnoble.com has forged a partnership with Adobe to promote Adobe's new e-book software, the Acrobat eBook Reader 2.0. The software is an updated version of the company's Glassbook software that features improvements such as a two-page display and clearer text. It's designed to enable people to download e-books to their PCs and read them, rather than to a hand-held e-book device. Acrobat eBook Reader 2.0 will be available only from the Barnesandnoble.com and Adobe Web sites, and users downloading from the Adobe site will see a link urging them to buy an e-book at the Barnes & Noble site. 
(The Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2001)
 http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB980115042367976875.htm 

Barnes & Noble dropped its eBook store on September 9, 2003

Dover Publications (books, eBooks) --- http://store.doverpublications.com/ 

The only place on earth where you'll find Dover's entire collection of unique, value-priced books, in-stock and ready to ship. Our site presently accepts orders for shipment to U.S. addresses.

We’re busy converting some of your favorite Dover titles into e-book format. Sign up for our ebook update service and we’ll send you an email as soon as titles (and these great benefits) become available. Instant access to sample chapters. Complete collections right on your PC. Free ebooks that you can share with your friend

University of Chicago listing of electronic books and journals --- http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/f/dtml?dtml=/e/db/index.dtml 

Macmillan Publishing's electronic computer books --- http://cma.zdnet.com/texis/zdrewards/mcpmore.html 

Listings of electronic journals in accounting (some are more reference databases than journals)

• http://www.emporia.edu/libsv/ejw/acctweb.htm 
  
  
• http://atech.wku.edu/~acctjournals/ 
  

Search engine for education sites --- http://www.searchedu.com/   

Over 20 million university and education pages indexed and ranked in order of popularity.

Search for electronic books --- http://www.searchebooks.com/ 
There were 293 hits for accounting books.

For more help in online searching go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

From Yahoo on September 11, 2000

Electronic Literature Organization --- http://www.eliterature.org/ 

First there was the groundbreaking Project Gutenberg, a collaborative effort to distribute world literature in electronic format. Now, e-books, e-ink, e-publishing, and e-reading devices are part of the daily buzz. The newly launched Electronic Literature Organization aims to serve as hub and gathering place for literati of the Net, providing news, resources for authors and readers, and a growing showcase of online work, from avant-garde hypertexts and visual poetry to more familiar fiction and non-fiction formats. The ELO is also building a directory, which promises to grow into a valuable catalog of digital authors and their online work.

Problems in Marketing Electronic Books

May 4, 2002 message from TXeBookAuthor@aol.com 

Dear Mr. Jensen:

I received a copy of one of your articles about eBooks from a friend who works at Trinity University. It was an excellent presentation and very insightful in all aspects except marketing. I thought perhaps you might want to hear a real world perspective from someone who has been through the eBook "wars" almost since their inception.

I am a Time Warner iPicturebooks author. My fantasy series, beginning with episode one, THE SCYTHIAN STONE, has done quite well both with mass marketers like Amazon.com (where it is currently ranked in the 3000 range) and in foreign markets like Mobipocket.com (#7 in their European fantasy eBook rankings). Sales figures are, by contract, confidential, but I can say that this title has done well despite the ups and downs eBooks have gone through over the last five years. During that time, I have learned some very important lessons about how to market electronic titles. I thought I would share my perspective with you and your readers.

Most eBook articles I have read forget to consider the most important aspect of this burgeoning concept--the MARKET for eBooks. Young readers are the market for them, as I see it, thus any eBook must be produced with that demographic in mind. Kids need colorful, fast reads with lively action and lots of character driven dialogue. Kids WANT to read, but most older books are written for the adult readers who have $24 to spend on a printed book. Most potential eBook customers are young, savvy Internet buyers who have their parents' credit card or $10 in their Paypal account or an Amazon coupon to spend. Price point thus becomes a huge issue along with this demographic. On the web, if you keep it cheap, kids will seek--that's where eBooks have their greatest advantage.

As for marketing to the rest of the web masses, another advantage is that you can post a new title for $8 retail and if it doesn't sell well, you can lower it by a dollar a month until you find its optimum price point. With the far lower cost of production and distribution per unit, you can market an eBook for as little as $1.00 if necessary to move it and there is never a problem with returns. Yes, they can be illegally copied. But then, is that really a bad thing for a kid to share a book with a friend or two who might BUY the next one in your series?

Sharing, in a way, actually builds a market that might not have been there before. I know. I've seen it firsthand. Emails I receive from customers attest to the fact that kids often send a copy of my first episode to a friend who is now waiting anxiously for the second book in the series so they can BUY a copy for themselves. These are readers I might never have attracted, if not for the lending effect. I'm sure, in the short run, this has cost me thousands of dollars in lost sales, but I prefer to look at this as a form of flattery, not thievery.

From my experience as a Time Warner eBook author, the great untapped market for electronic books is the 8 to 18 year olds who have Internet access from pl aces like Bangladesh, Bali, and Botswana where there are far fewer bookstores, limited copies of English language books and an exchange rate that makes the dollar king. The scary thing is, nobody yet knows the true size of this arena or where it will take eBooks in the future. I'm betting that with a good handheld reading device made available for under $50, within the next five years eBooks will become a staple addition to the entertainment and educational reading world.

Thank you for your article and your time. I look forward to your reply.

Jon Baxley 
A Time Warner iPicturebooks 
Author THE SCYTHIAN STONE series

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005R217 

http://hometown.aol.com/wasp1946/ 

Campus Bookstore Options

New Option for Student Shoppers: E-Books
As students at eight colleges shop for notebooks and car decals this fall, they’ll have another product to consider at the campus bookstore: electronic textbooks. But not everyone expects the e-books fly off the shelves. The eight colleges have partnered with the wholesale company MBS Textbook Exchange to offer about 30 textbooks at 33 percent below the normal cover price. “It’s about giving students a cheaper option,” said Jeff Cohen, advertising and promotions manager at MBS.
David Epstein, "New Option for Student Shoppers: E-Books," Inside Higher Ed, August 12, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/12/ebooks

Electronic Libraries

Bob Jensen's links to libraries on the Web --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#Librarian'sIndex 

Six leading e-libraries are as follows:  

• Questia --- http://www.questia.com/Questia.jsp 

• XanEdu --- http://www.xanedu.com/index.shtml 

•  ebrary --- http://www.ebrary.com/ 

• Britannica.com --- http://www.britannica.com/ 

• Jones e-global Library --- http://www.egloballibrary.com/ 

• NetLibrary http://www.netlibrary.com/ 

For more information, visit www.eduventures.com .

University of Chicago listing of electronic books and journals ---
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/f/dtml?dtml=/e/db/index.dtml 

The Michigan Electronic Library --- http://mel.lib.mi.us/ 

Electronic Texta and Publishing Resources --- http://www.loc.gov/global/etext/etext.html 

ebrary  (full-text search of hundreds of business and economics books) --- http://learningnetwork.ebrary.com/

ebrary's solutions include: eContent Distribution – We give publishers the ability to tap the Internet to increase sales and distribution. ebrarian™ – Our ebrarian solution helps online community aggregators retain customers, create eCommerce opportunities and build brands. ebrarian Pro – Fast and accurate, ebrarian Pro helps libraries and information professionals make the business of performing research easy and cost effective. ebrarian A+ – For eLearning properties, ebrarian A+ makes word-level content interaction a reality, generating new comprehension and commerce opportunities.

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic libraries  --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

Top 20 eBooks --- http://www.questia.com/top20ebooks/top20ebooks.html  

netLibrary Electronic Books

From the Director of the Trinity University Library on May 17, 2000:

As part of the library's continued efforts to offer the latest resources, we've licensed access to 500 carefully selected titles from netLibrary electronic books. Before those become available, they've given us free access to the entire library of 18,000 titles for a short time (thru June 5th). Later this summer we'll announce permanent access to the shorter list of current, scholarly titles thru this forum.

Please take a look. You can click on: http://www.netlibrary.com. The interface is very easy; some brief instructions appear below. The attached Word document offers some added details. The titles include some that I think you will appreciate.

Please submit your comments or thoughts to your liaison librarian or me. Our marketing rep indicates he also will be happy to address questions about this exciting new technology. See his email address below....

Thanks.
Richard Meyer [rmeyer@Trinity.edu] 

What was new at McGraw-Hill in Spring 2001?

04/02	McGraw-Hill Higher Education offers digital textbooks through netLibrary's MetaText
04/02	McGraw-Hill Education to digitally transform operations
03/29	Standard & Poor's announces launch of new Royalty Income Trust Index for Canada
03/29	ECAT Chairman Harold McGraw III urges U.S. Congress to pass broad trade promotion authority
03/28	S&P expands Singapore and SE Asia corporates coverage
03/28	S&P introduces Servicer Evaluation Seal

New York, N.Y., April 2, 2001 — McGraw-Hill Higher Education, a unit of McGraw-Hill Education and a leading provider of electronic learning solutions for the college market, today announced it has formed an alliance with MetaText, netLibrary's digital textbook division, to develop electronic versions of its college textbooks that will be ready for review this spring.

In a move designed to enhance student learning and help professors manage their courses, McGraw-Hill for the first time will make its digital-textbooks available through classroom websites created with its PageOut® course management software, which is free to professors who use McGraw-Hill materials. With over 50,000 registered professors, PageOut® continues to be the most user-friendly course management tool available. Through PageOut® , a student can view a professor's instructions and notes, take tests prepared by instructors, and directly link to a MetaText e-textbook and other electronic tools, such as McGraw-Hill's Online Learning Centers, exercises and links to related websites.

MetaText will convert about 30 McGraw-Hill market-leading textbooks, covering a variety of subject areas including Economics, Accounting, Communications, English, Biology, Anatomy & Physiology and GeoScience. MetaText's production staff will digitize McGraw-Hill textbooks and make them available throughout the spring and summer for review and adoption by instructors at colleges and universities throughout the North America. Instructors will be able to adopt MetaText editions directly through McGraw-Hill Higher Education sales representatives and begin using the McGraw-Hill Metatext editions in the fall semester of 2001.

This alliance is part of McGraw-Hill Education's strategy to combine its superior content with the best of technology to enhance learning at all levels any time, any place, in any format and on any device. It also adds to the over 400 e-textbooks McGraw-Hill offers through Primis Online and alliances with other e-textbook developers.

Barnes & Noble will pay authors a 35% royalty!
Barnes & Noble Digital decides to become a publisher ---  http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,41056,00.html 

Figuring that nobody knows how to market e-books better than those who sell books for a living, retailer Barnes & Noble Digital will soon become a virtual publishing house.

"After all, it’s bookstores that have always had the most power in their ability to recommend books and move titles," said Simon Lipskar of the Writer's House.

Hoping to attract readers, all e-books will be priced under $8. Authors, meanwhile, will want to know if their titles will be sold at other venues.

Barnes & Noble Digital will launch this spring with the digital imprint of "The Book of Counted Sorrows," by Dean Koontz. But contrary to published reports, BN.com is not just culling titles from out of print book lists and established authors. Michael Fragnito and his editorial staff are actively seeking new talent.

Barnes & Noble Digital will try to attract authors with competitive advances and a flat rate of 35 percent of the cover price. The best incentive may be that it can provide a one-stop, direct-to-market process. It also will provide authors the ability to track the progress of sales, which hasn't always been easy.

"In our conversations with (agents) we keep hearing that writers want to be treated like grown-ups, get fair treatment and know how their books are selling," Fragnito said. "We are going to offer them all that."

BN.com is also considering giving authors the ability to become more involved in marketing their titles than they have been at traditional houses. One author-inspired idea that Fragnito is considering is letting a writer invest part of the book advance back into the marketing budget of his or her title.

According to one agent, a serious reservation about the new imprint is that while Barnes and Noble (stores and website) accounts for 10 percent of all books sold in the United States, what will happen to BN.com-published books at other book outlets?

---

Reply from John C. Roberts, Jr.

B&N took a significant step in this area when they acquired Fatbrain.com last November. Fatbrain was only a four year old company at that time but they had made significant progress in providing both digital content and paper books. There offerings were mostly for engineers and scientists, hence the name fatbrain. They were also pioneers in developing secure digital content that could be sold over the web with a low degree of copyright problems. Most of Fatbrain's current business is providing digital content to corporations both in the form of digital reference books and also converting the corporations paper documents to a digital format for easy distribution of the company's net.

Last March Fatbrain created the MightyWords™ subsidiary to capitalize on mass-market digital-publishing opportunities. In June MightyWords™ was spun off as an independent company with a $20 million investment by B&N and $16 million form other investors. Fatbrain kept about 23% of the company. It appears that the acquisition of Fatbrain will also give B&N full control of MightyWords™.

Prior to the purchase of Fatbrain, B&N had already been using MightyWords™ to distribute digital books. This content is not for e-books but are normally available in secure, downloadable PDF files for the user to read on screen or print as they wish. I personally believe that e-books will be the established standard in the future but these PDF files do give people without an e-book the opportunity to purchase and read digital format without the additional equipment purchase. These files are also meant to be read using Glassbook or Microsoft Reader.

I guess my main point in this rambling is that I believe B&N is uniquely positioned to offer digital content due to these recent acquisitions.

You can check out Fatbrain at http://www.fatbrain.com  and MightyWords™ at http://www.mightywords.com 

John C. Roberts, Jr. 
St. Johns River Community College 
283 College Drive Orange Park, FL 32065 (904) 276-6816 FAX (904) 276-6888

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.

Barnes and Noble University still seems to be up and running as of September 9, 2003!
Free courses from Barnes & Noble University --- http://www.barnesandnobleuniversity.com/ 

Rovia Electronic Books

Roviia is a relatively new electronic book publisher.  

Robert , 
Thanks for your time today. I have set you up with a Rovia account, and put the titles we discussed in your account. To access them, you must first download our secure RovReader. This is available at our web site, www.rovia.com . After you have downloaded the reader, start it and log in to your account. Your user name is your email address from above. Your password is your first name, Robert . Once you are in you can see the titles enabled in your account by clicking on the link, "Go to your BOOK LIST". From there you can view the titles and see how they look online.

I'll call you in a few days to make sure everything is going smoothly and see where we go from here.

Thanks in advance for your time, I look forward to talking with you soon.

_____________________________________________________________________

Matt Kenslea
Vice President, Academic Sales
Rovia, Inc.
82 Brookline Ave
Boston, MA 02215
617-778-7556
www.rovia.com 

You can read the following at http://www.rovia.com/about.html 

Rovia is a young, dynamic, MIT-bred startup that develops proprietary software to provide secure access to valuable information over the web. Complying with copyright laws, Rovia's technology allows the user to view and interact with digitized material including: textbooks, articles, and brokerage research reports.

The possibility of copyright infringement has held the publishing industry back from reaping the benefits of the internet revolution. Publishers have realized that once a copy of their content is out on the web, unrestricted reproduction would seriously undermine their revenue. Rovia has addressed this problem by implementing a business model that allows access fees to be collected, each time the content is viewed.

The business model relies on two key elements: an internet based syndication platform and proprietary software - the RovReader - that permits viewing documents without compromising copyright law.

Rovia competes toe-to-toe with WizeUp. 

E Ink Emerges

Reading on a PDA or e-book may never be the same. With new electronic ink displays, handheld devices may become lighter, thinner and easier to read than ever before --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,42056,00.html 

E Ink and Philips Components announced plans this week to jointly develop high-resolution electronic ink displays for handheld devices such as PDAs and electronic books.

The high-contrast, low-power displays could lead to PDAs, cell phones, pagers, e-books and other handheld devices that are lighter and more readable than ever before, said Russ Wilcox, vice president and general manager for E Ink.

Under the agreement, Philips Venture Capital and Philips Components will invest $7.5 million in E Ink to help advance research and development.

In return, Philips Components secured exclusive global rights to manufacture and sell handheld devices using E Ink's technology. The companies plan to develop a prototype later this year that they expect to be available to consumers by 2003.

As anyone who has arduously squinted while reading text on a laptop or Palm handheld knows, the electronic display industry has been dominated by liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that can be difficult to read.

Electronic ink, which combines the look of ink on paper with the dynamic capability of an electronic display, could revolutionize the way that text is displayed, Wilcox said.

E Ink's technology contains millions of black and white particles in microcapsules that, when electrically charged, either sink to the bottom or float to the top. The ink can be coated over large areas cheaply and continually updated with new information, and it works on virtually any surface, from plastic to metal and paper.

Last year, E Ink became the first company to bring electronic ink to market, beating Xerox PARC's Gyricon Media, which researched the technology for more than two decades.

In mid-December, Lucent Technologies and E Ink unveiled their first commercial product called Immedia -- large indoor signs that can be changed automatically by remote two-way pagers controlled through the Internet.

So far E Ink has focused on developing these large text displays. But the agreement with Philips marks a fundamental shift toward creating high-resolution, graphical electronic displays.

E Ink hopes to use Philips' global reach to seep into the handheld display market, which is expected to exceed $10 billion over the next few years, according to DisplaySearch.

The e Ink homepage is at http://www.eink.com/ 

Electronic ink products are redefining how information is displayed. Information that was once static can now be dynamic. And the dynamic information of today will no longer be confined to rigid flat glass screens. With electronic ink, information can be displayed on any surface, wherever it's needed.

With such a vast range of opportunities, E Ink has chosen to focus product and technology development on three major needs:

Immedia™

Personal Devices

Publishing with Paper 2.0

This has got to be good!

"How to Teach Accounting With E-Books," Pro2Net, June 19, 2000 http://accounting.pro2net.com/research/solutions/education/soed000619.asp 
By Terri Folks terfolks@aol.com 

(June 19, 2000) - Are electronic books or e-books the next generation of textbook publishing? As the world has moved toward electronic communication, the educational community has been forced to reevaluate learning opportunities including supplemental course materials. With the advent of interactive software programs, students can practice equations, take sample tests and download their textbooks a chapter at a time.

According to Trinity University Accounting Professor Robert Jensen in San Antonio, Texas, the main advantages are hypertext navigation, hypermedia, animation, live links to the Internet, text search and content updating frequency. Jensen is the Webmaster of a site at the San Antonio University that follows accounting trends ( www.trinity.edu/rjensen  ).

"Electronic textbooks can, in theory, be updated in real time," he said. "Users of Softbooks, for example, can download early editions of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times each morning."

The rest of the article is at http://accounting.pro2net.com/research/solutions/education/soed000619.asp 

Electronic Books Are Not Popular With Every Reader

AccountingStudents Newsletter: July 11, 2000 http://www.accountingstudents.com 

STUDENTS SHARE THOUGHTS ON E-TEXTBOOKS Many responded to an inquiry in last week's newsletter: Why are e-textbooks so unattractive to accounting students? Here's what some of you had to say:

"With a real live book, the student can highlight certain passages, run their finger down the pages, and keep it close and handy while doing problems."

"Personally, I favor traditional textbooks because you can get comfortable in a recliner with them."

"Students without their own computers find e-books extremely inconvenient and many just don't like to read on the computer."

"The expense of printing your own text would be similar to the actual cost of the book."

"There's just something sacred about being able to highlight the important parts."

"I stare at a computer all day at work. The last thing I want to do is read a book on the thing! Besides, a tangible printed textbook is much more reliable than a computer ever will be!"

Steven J. Zipperstein, the David E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. Excerpts follow.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/23/technology/23TANK.html 

I write these words in a building on the Stanford campus carved out of limestone, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead at the turn of the century, when he helped John Stanford transform his massive horse farm into a university. Mine was among the first buildings; the humanities here remain housed mostly in these older, sedate, dusty buildings, with the sciences, the law school and the business school in far more plush, up-to-date quarters.

Here I sit in a book-lined study, with shelves of wood (and also, admittedly, a new Dell computer), where I spend my days reading, writing and speaking with students and colleagues. It is much the same routine as has existed for faculty in the better-endowed universities for much of the century. Outside my window, just across the street, is the business school, which now prepares its students primarily for work in high-tech jobs. Its basement lunchroom has the most aggressive feel on campus. On the streets of my morning commute, I pass company after company at the forefront of the technological transformation. . . .

When I consider their impact, I conflate it with the fact that both my favorite bookstores here — one for new books and the other for used books — shut down in the last three months. This is, of course, a direct result of the popularity of Web-based book buying and the impact of megabookstores. A few blocks from the now-closed secondhand bookstore, a sleek, very, very fashionable shop with wide aisles displaying, it seems, fabulously expensive design books and magazines has opened, and is doing brisk business. These tomes — gorgeous, seductive nonbooks — are mostly oversize, packed with pictures, and the people who crowd into the shop peruse their pages in ways altogether different, it seems, from "true" readers. They inhale them with their eyes; they move across their pages without the tense, alert attention demanded by books. On their faces one sees obvious, casual pleasure, but not learning. I refuse, on principle, to walk in.

Am I a Luddite smarting in the wake of inescapable change? The analogy feels, at times, all too apt, and I bristle at it. Especially since I, too, cannot resist being deeply impressed by the technological discoveries around me, including electronic books the size of paperbacks containing full libraries. Who can fail to be impressed by the prospect of tiny chips the size of one's shirt buttons that claim to hold all human knowledge acquired since Rousseau?

Electronic Book Message Threads
Bob Jensen at Trinity University 

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) 

April 18, 1999
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99q2.htm#041899 

One of the most controversial technologies for publishing are the electronic books that allow you to download entire copyrighted books into special hardware devices called "E-books."  Unlike netLibrary described above, these electronic books cannot be downloaded into desktop or laptop computers.  Nevertheless, electronic books have some advantages of computers such as text selection devices, highlighters, stylus pens for taking notes on margins of pages, hypertext linking, insertion of bookmarks, and keyword search capabilities.  Purportedly, E-books are easier to navigate than books downloaded into personal computers.  They do not allow computer utilities such as cut, copy, paste, and screen duplication.  Most do not yet connect to the Internet, although that type of connection is expected in the next round of upgrades to such devices.  The devices themselves are light, and some offer two screens to resemble adjoining pages of a hard copy book. 

The major publishing companies such as Random House and McGraw-Hill are coding selected manuscripts into electronic books.  Major advantages to publishers include avoiding the cost of printing in multiple colors on hard copy paper and destruction of the used book market.  Books can be updated more frequently, and holders of existing books can download new editions for reduced fees.  Dealers are easily bypassed with direct downloads over telephone lines.

Advantages to readers include lower prices, more frequent upgrades, and the ability to store five books or more into one easy to carry electronic book.  Drawbacks mainly center around screen quality and preferences for readers to view hard copy pages.

For a review see "Electronic Textbooks: From Paper to Pixels," Syllabus, February 1999, pp. 16-19.  The online version can be found at http://www.syllabus.com/feb99_magfea.html .  In that article Steve Epstein reports the following"

Major university projects, such as The Humanities Text Initiative at the University of Michigan (http://www.hti.umich.edu/ ) and Project Bartleby at Columbia ( http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/ ) have already begun to create and disseminate electronic versions of books.

One of the E-book devices is called Rocket eBook at http://www.rocketbook.com/ from NuvoMedia.  The following facts are given at the Rocket eBook web site:

About the size of a paperback, the Rocket eBook™ holds some 4,000 pages of words and images. That's about 10 novels. Weighing just 22 ounces, the Rocket eBook nestles easily in the curve of your palm. And it goes wherever you go - so you can take off in any direction and never be far from what you want or need to read.

Another E-book device is called the Softbook Electronic Tablet from Softbook Press at http://www.softbook.com/index.html .   Don Steinberg gives it raves at http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,368946,00.html .  He claims that this device has the best screen resolution.

Note Added July 5, 2000:

Get the complete lowdown on the next-generation Rocket eBook and add your two cents to community-member feedback by posting to the "Martin Eberhard's Keynote Address at ReBA Con" and the "ReBA Con 2000 'Official' report" threads on the rocket.ebook newsgroup. http://www.rocket-library.com/support/newsgroups.asp 

July 30, 1999 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99q3.htm#073099 

I just purchased a Rocket e-Book (my price was $282).  This allows me to download copyrighted books and journals that are available for purchase in hard copy but are not available on the web.  I found the selection of books to be very limited, but I anticipate that more will quickly become available as the Rocket e-Book takes off.

The Rocket e-Book has a cradle that attaches to your serial port of a PC linked to the Internet.  You can then set up your account and download books and journals online.  Note that you do not have to be connected to your PC in order to use the Rocket e-Book.  You only have to connect when you want to download some more books.  You can also delete books and reload them from an online library of books that you have selected for possible downloading.

The portable e-Book device will hold over 4,000 pages (about 10 books on average).  However, for about $99 it can be upgraded to where it will hold 32,000 pages (about 100 books).  It has a built-in standard dictionary (Random House).  You can point to most any word in a book and bring up the definition.  You may not, however, install other dictionaries for more technical terminology.  The battery is good for about 30 hours before you have to recharge in the cradle.  Both the cradle and the e-Book are portable and do not have to be connected to a PC except for initialization of your account and for downloading books.  The Rocket e-Book weighs 22 ounces, but it is easier to hold in one hand than a book.   You can flip pages easily with your thumb while holding the book in one hand.  Warning:  old duffers who tend to doze should not drop the device even though they are prone to dropping books on the floor when they nod.  It should come with a wrist cord.  It does have a very nice carrying case.  Its dimensions without the case are roughly 7 inches by 4.5 inches.

One nice surprise is that some books can be downloaded free as an enticement to purchase other books.  For example, I am a mystery buff.  I downloaded two mystery books (including one Agatha Christie book) for free.  You can also download free samplers of books.  The screen is monochrome, but the resolution is quite good.  Old duffers like me can increase the font size.  It will show the graphics.  Audio is available, but the speakers are as bad or worse than laptop speakers.

With this gadget I will probably read books that I would not otherwise think of reading.  The library list is pretty strong on the classics.  It is weak on new books from publishing houses.  Specialty books are available, but the selection is very limited.  You should probably investigate what books are available before purchasing the Rocket e-Book.  

Key web sites are as follows:

Franklin Electronic Publisher for Rocket e-Book at http://www.franklin.com/ 
Rocket e-Book Library at http://www.rocket-library.com/ 
Barnes & Noble e-Books at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bookshelf/ebooks/epub1.asp 

There are a slew of new Rocket editions you can download from: 
http://www.powells.com 
http://www.bn.com 
http://www.ecampus.com 

Another E-book device is called the Softbook Electronic Tablet from Softbook Press at http://www.softbook.com/index.html.  Don Steinberg gives it raves at http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,368946,00.html .  He claims that this device has the best screen resolution among the electronic book alternatives..

You can now purchase or rent them from netLibrary. See http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A2356.cfm  

A veritable library of electronic books has been created on the Internet by netLibrary. At www.netlibrary.com you can search, view and borrow eBooks such as reference, scholarly, mass market and professional publications. The list of publishers providing content include: Grove's Dictionaries, Inc., Macmillan Ltd., National Academy Press, St. Martin's Press, The Brookings Institution and McGraw-Hill Companies, as well as many university presses such as Cambridge University Press, Columbia University Press, Duquesne University Press, University of Akron Press, University of California Press, University of North Carolina Press, New York University Press, Ohio University Press and Rutgers University Press.The netLibrary provides the services of a traditional library in that patrons have the option of either borrowing the eBook and viewing it online, or viewing it offline by downloading it to their computer. Patrons will have to wait for eBooks that have been lent to other patrons before them. Some of the nation's major libraries are charter customers of netLibrary. Individuals and corporations may also become customers and check out what these cyber shelves hold. netLibrary, Boulder, CO, (303) 415-2548, www.netlibrary.com  .

The Rocket e-Book was priced at about $300, but it is now much cheaper.  Many books are free, and some journals are available.  You must pay for other books, but the prices are quite reasonable.  Most publishers also allow you to download free samples.  About 500 books are available for the Softbook.  Softbook users may also subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.  This would be much easier to read on a plane or train than the hard copy versions.  The Softbook costs $599 whereas the Rocket e-Book is only $299 before academic or other discounts.

What amazed me are the books that can be downloaded free.  I can understand getting free classics such as Alice in Wonderland, the works of Shakespeare, and a lot of Keats' poetry books.  But the selected free downloads of Agatha Christie books and the Sherlock Holmes books surprised me since the same books are actively sold in book stores at prices that are not free.  You can view many of the free selections at http://www.rocket-library.com/.  Some of the free downloads are amazing and some appear to be garbage.  It is nice that readers supply reviews of unfamiliar books.  You can spontaneously submit your own reviews.

eBooks
Why do publishing firms like Rocket e-Book and Softbook?

• No printing costs (not even any need for color imaging, although color may not be far off in this technology).
• No costs of distributing and warehousing and marketing of hard copy (This eliminates most of the publisher's cost).
• No chance of pirating pages with a photocopy machine.
• Since pages of the book cannot be placed in a scanner, pictures and text cannot be digitized (and as a result, text images cannot be converted into text files with OCR software such as Omni Page Pro).
• Owners cannot resell the books or even give them away without giving up the entire e-Book or Softbook device.
• Owners can more easily shop for books to download without having to go to malls.
• Owners may find books that are not available in local bookstores.
• Owners may be more apt to think to shop for some books since going to the marketing web sites is so convenient.

Why are publishing firms afraid of electronic books in general, including web-based books? 

Textbooks

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

January 3, 2008 reply from Don Ramsey [dramsey@UDC.EDU]

Students may have access to computers, but not all have laptops. I used an e-book for a year, hoping to pioneer the cost savings (free, at freeloadpress.com), but found that students would not bring their books (laptops) to class. They could not follow the problems being demonstrated, nor others picked spontaneously, not to mention various illustrations. In a class of perhaps 25, I would see 3 or 4 laptops in use. At first I tried printing handouts for the classroom problems, but that got to be a real chore very quickly.

A related problem was that they could not study or do homework anywhere but where their computer is located; e.g., between classes, at lunch, etc.

Some would print the chapters. This got to be a lot of work and fairly expensive. (A real hoot: The free textbook is supported financially by internal advertising. Some students would go to Kinko's to print. Kinko's software absolutely would not print the text legibly. Letters would be run together, etc., etc. I checked with a Kinko's technician who had several years experience with .pdf files, and he could not make it work. So, guess who is one of the major advertisers within the book? Bingo--Kinko's, naturally! And I doubt they have fixed the problem.)

There were other problems less significant individually, but more so in the aggregate. Students would fail to make the download promptly. We reproduced Part I on disks, but some still procrastinated or had last-minute (i.e., pre-exam) installation problems. Downloads are long for those with dial-up access. University labs can suffice for those not having their own computers, but there are limitations of location away from home (all our students are commuters) plus administrative approval for installation.

A major issue arose in that other sections did not use the same textbook; so I have decided to rejoin my colleagues with their conventional textbook. This is particularly important in standardizing chapter coverage for assessment purposes.

So, I am back to the good old portable textbook. The half-year version, which at least weighs less than the complete boat anchor.

I still have a major issue with every textbook I have seen, in that the question banks (which I believe tend to validate performance on a national level) are woefully inadequate. There ought to be a plenitude of objective questions on every subtopic, so that the question bank can be used for quizzes and examinations without duplication. Some publishers' question banks are barely adequate; some are downright spotty as to topical coverage. To expect sufficient questions for two semesters without duplication is apparently utterly unrealistic. I have a strong suspicion that neither the "editors" (marketers) nor the authors pay attention to the content supplied by the contractors who write the question banks.

The software houses that provide generic exam software would do well to add a feature that allows the instructor to keep track of which questions have already been used, so as to avoid using the same question on an exam that had already been used in a quiz. (Actually I used to give two quizzes per chapter, pre- and post-.)

Of course, when we reach saturation, or nearly so, of laptop ownership, the whole picture would change. Publishers who anticipate that situation are to be congratulated. The price of conventional textbooks is outrageous. (But at e-book prices, would authors be motivated to write?) Perhaps our school is behind the curve, laptop-wise. Clearly the market for distance courses, at least, is made to order for the e-book.

Finally, there is the problem of students who are determined to avoid the textbook entirely, electronic or not. I have one colleague who says his course gets easier every time the student takes it.

Wishing you all an excellent 2008!

Cheers,

Don Ramsey

I think the primary fear among publishers is that authors are tempted to by-pass publishing houses by producing and distributing their own books.  You can write your own electronic book, make it available to the world, and receive 100% of the revenues.  Of course you can also write your own textbooks and publish them directly on the web.  Professors Murthy and Groomer were pathfinders in publishing online electronic textbooks through Cybertext Publishing at http://www.cybertext.com/ .  I use the Accounting and Informations Systems textbook and force my students to take weekly quizzes that are graded by Cybertext.  A listing of older (some are still updated)  Cybertext books is shown below:

Accounting Information Systems: A Database Approach
by Uday S. Murthy and S. Michael Groomer
Preview Version for Check Payers

An Information Technology Primer
by Uday S. Murthy and S. Michael Groomer

Advanced Systems Analysis and Design
by Uday S. Murthy, Ph.D., ACA
Preview Version for Check Payers

Database Systems Design & Development
by Uday S. Murthy
Preview Version for Check Payers

The Audit Learning Guide
by S. Michael Groomer, David S. Kerr, and Uday S. Murthy
Preview Version for Check Payers

Other Online Textbooks

• http://www.wizeup.com/ 

• http://www.virtualpublishing.net/ 

• http://www.varsitybooks.com/ 

• http://bigwords.com/home/ 

• http://www.textbooks.com/ 

Other Online Publishers

• http://www.cybertext.com/

• http://www.wadsworth.com/ http://www.prenhall.com/ 

• South-Western College Publishing --- http://www.swcollege.com/ 

Taxpoint: http://taxpoint.swcollege.com/taxpoint_2001/taxpoint.html 
StudyLive: http://www.swcollege.com/acct/studylive/studylive.html 
INTACCT: http://www.swcollege.com/acct/rama/intacct/intacct.html 
Computerized Principles of Accounting:  http://www.swcollege.com/acct/klooster_introacct/klooster.html 

Also see my Wizeup discussion at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm#051500 

Free online textbooks and cases --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

Will online books and/or e-Books replace hard copy on campus?  Once again there is bad news and good news.  Students probably will prefer reading from hard copy.  Some courses need color images, especially science courses.  Online books must be viewed on PCs or printed as desired on a computer printer.  It is not possible to read e-Books on a PC or to print the pages.  An e-Book must be viewed in a device such as Rocket e-Book or Softbook.  It sounds a bit unlikely, but there are some advantages for students if and when their textbooks are available for e-Book and Softbook.  These advantages include:

• All books for the semester or even the year can be downloaded quickly and easily into one relatively light and portable device, thereby eliminating the need for back packs that weigh 35 pounds.
• Books that are inadvertently erased from the device are easily downloaded for no added replacement fee.
• A word's definition pops up simply by clicking on the word.
• The entire book can be searched with simple word searches.
• It is possible to highlight key passages.
• It is easy to bookmark and return to key passages.
• Users can take notes (although punching each letter with a stylus is very slow).
• Because of the tremendous savings in the cost of printing, distributing, storing, and paying campus bookstore commissions, some of the savings may be passed along to students.
• I expect that book rentals will one day be available so that users can download a book for a day or a week at lower prices.  This may be sufficient for research work (e.g., to merely look something up or find a quotation).  
• Students may be able to one day locate research books that are not available in the campus library and download these books "just-in-time" rather than having to wait and pray for two weeks that Interlibrary Loan will deliver the book from some other library.
• Students will have less skin cancer since they cannot use e-Book devices in bright sunlight.
• If this technology catches on, it can only get better.  For example, the e-Book that I just bought may be analogous to buying the first IBM PC that did not even have a hard drive in the 1980s.  The e-Book of the future may hold an entire library of books and charges may be on the basis of usage rather than a fee for downloading the book.  For example, there might be no charge for books in the device that are never accessed.  Readers may pay a usage fee for the time a particular book is being used plus a fixed cost of initial access.

Immediate improvements would be wrist strap and a cord that prevents users from misplacing the stylus.  Medium-term improvements would be a detachable keyboard (like the keyboard that is at last available for the Palm VII), a color screen, and a wireless modem connection that bypasses a PC when users want to download books.  Long-term improvements would be to add a wireless digital phone and enough memory to store hundreds of books (coupled with a new fee arrangement based upon book usage rather than book downloading).  One day these devices may be a part of wireless computers (e.g., a subset of the computer that cannot be accessed by other parts of the computer for copying pages into the computer's hard drive.)

I do not think that these devices will replace hard copy in this decade, but then I didn't buy a PC until 1990 --- I thought it would never be anything but a gadget for bored adults to play with in leisure time.  I was a main frame die hard!  Now I own an e-Book and have joined the "Boys-and-Their-Toys Club."

After posting the first version of the July 30 New Bookmarks on the AECM, Craig Polhemus wrote the following:

Here at the American Accounting Association, we are experimenting with both devices. (And also eagerly awaiting release of the Everybook [ www.everybook.net  ].)

We of course are looking at them from the perspective of a publisher, though one less concerned about unauthorized copying than most commercial publishers. In this regard, the inability to "cut and paste" or print from these electronic books is more of a drawback than an advantage for us.

One aspect you did not dwell on is the (limited) ability in each system to add your own materials. For the Rocket e-book, you can add PDF files on your own -- but, due to the small size of the screen, essentially every table, graph, etc., would need to be re-formatted.

For the Softbook, you can add ASCII files on your own and can allegedly buy software (some of which is not really released yet) to convert HTML files as well. Unlike the Rocket e-book, the Softbook screen is about a full page, so tables and graphs that are already in HTML will probably look pretty good without manual re-formatting to fit another screen size.

I believe screen size is very important for professional journals, which is why I am so eager to see a functioning Everybook -- it is said to show two portrait pages at once. I envision this as being important to someone who wants to look at a chart or graph on one page while reading relevant text on another. (I do not know how easy it may be to transfer one's own material to the Everybook -- I've been told to "expect a response" to my inquiries of a month or so ago.)

So far, I have downloaded PDF versions of Accounting Horizons articles to the Rocket e-book and transferred ASCII versions of various AAA materials to the Softbook. The Softbook company has also promised to convert one or more articles from the online HTML version of Accounting Horizons to Softbook format -- I'll check tonight to see if they have done so. I will have both devices with me at the AAA Annual Meeting in San Diego, if any list members are interested in seeing them.

Ultimately, I think B5-sized notebook computers will have all the capabilities of these early electronic books without the dubious "advantage" of restricting printing and copying text. However, for now the electronic books are about one-tenth the cost, and even after B5 prices stabilize it may be that copy-fearing publishers will keep the separate electronic book market alive as well.

(As a reader rather than a publisher, I like both the Rocket e-book and the Softbook -- with an edge toward the latter because of its larger screen size. On the other hand, the Rocket e-book's ability to present text either portrait or landscape is a really neat feature! I read several books on the Softbook on the way to and from the AAA First Globalization Conference in Taiwan, and although the Softbook is heavier than one book, it's much lighter than ten!)
Craig Polhemus, American Accounting Association [ AAACraig@AOL.COM ]

Especially note Craig's reference to the forthcoming Everybook Dedicated Reader described at http://www.everybook.net/.  Everybook will have two screens that open up like a book.  More importantly, they will be color screens (I don't know what this will do to battery life and weight).

Medical Professionals on the run can read their journals and reference books in full color, with easy-to-view charts, graphs, and formulas, as well as high-resolution photographs and illustrations.

Thanks to its cutting-edge technology, the EB Dedicated Reader™ is poised to take its place as the natural extension of the traditional book.

August 11, 1999  
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99q3.htm#081199 

Dear Robert Jensen:

NuvoMedia is excited to announce today the launch of eRocket(TM). eRocket is a software only version of the Rocket eBook(TM) that works on your PC screen and allows you to read free RocketEditions(TM) available from Rocket-Library.com or ones you've created with RocketWriter.

If you've been hoping for a tool that:

* allows previews of free RocketEditions before sending them to the Rocket eBook

* enables your friends who want to read RocketEditions you've created or contributed to Rocket-Library.com but don't have a Rocket eBook to read

* shows your friends what the Rocket eBook can do without having to give them your Rocket eBook

* share your enthusiasm for the eBook industry

Then, eRocket can help.

Try the new software at: http://info.nuvomedia.com/Key=1415.Gs.B.BtfX7l 

Let us know what you think. In addition, if you create skins for eRocket, send it to erocket@rocket-ebook.com and qualify to win a Rocket eBook t-shirt or a Rocket eBook. Details for skins are posted on the Rocket eBook Web page.

Best,
Cynthia Mun

September 4, 1999  
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99q3.htm#090499 

There is now a memory upgrade ($99 until September 30, 1999) that will raise the number of books that you can store at one time from approximately ten books to 100 books --- an additional 32,000 pages of text and graphics. That translates to 100 more books on your Rocket eBook! This powerful upgrade brings you the freedom of conveniently taking even more books, web sites and documents wherever you go. There are now about 1,200 books available for downloading for a fee and another 1,000 (many classics) that can be downloaded free.  Along with the additional memory, you will also have a more extensive dictionary that has over 75,000 definitions with hundreds of new words and meanings.  

I upgraded my Rocket eBook at http://www.rocket-ebook.com/Auto/32meg.html 

You can download eBooks books for a fee from Barnes & Noble at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/subjects/ebooks/ebooks.asp?&sourceid=00096832100249871520&bfdate=09-03-1999+16:29:01 

You can download free eBooks from http://www.rocket-library.com/ 

September 21, 1999  
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99q3.htm#092199 

Update on the amazing Everybook

You can read more Rocket eBook and its leading competitors at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99.htm#Rocket .  I just received my upgraded model that will hold about 100 books.  Note that over half the books are free for Rocket eBook.  However, Softbook is better if you want daily downloads of the NY Times and The Wall Street Journal.  We are all awaiting the (probably expensive) colored two-screen model from Everybook at http://www.nvisiontek.com/

The Everybook Storewill be a hard wired collection of fileservers containing electronic publications, complete with graphics and typographically formatted text, from the dust jacket to the back cover art. Publishers will provide, on a consignment basis, the electronic files created by their composers and shipped to printing companies. The EB Dedicated Reader (EB) can display the read-only versions of those same files without the loss of page layouts, in the same vertical format as that of a printed page. The publications will be accessed by computer modems, via the Internet connecting the EBS with EB Dedicated Readers around the world. The EBS will also access bank accounts of EB owners via electronic funds transfer, to debit accounts at the moment of publication purchase. By automating the browsing, purchase, delivery, and payment for publications, Everybook, Inc. will dramatically reduce costs for publishers, consumers, and the natural environment.

The Everybook Store is a digital archive, where publications are stored on hard disks and backed up to digital linear tracking tape. A large database of titles and publication jackets, organized by title, author and subject, is linked to the redundant array of disk storage units. The database has a user-friendly graphical interface, which can appear as a virtual library, bookstore, or powerful search engine. EB owners access the EBS file server holding the publication database via high speed phone lines and a toll-free, universal phone number. When the EB owner accesses the Everybook Store, the server verifies the EB by its unique security chip and the owner's prearranged debit account. Once verified, the user is allowed to browse a public domain library, an English Bookstore, a Non-English Bookstore, and a Subscription Store. Selections are downloaded as compressed PDF files, onto a secure PCMCIA storage card. The card should hold hundreds of books, magazines, and newspapers, and may only be accessed by the EB which was used to purchase the publications.

September 28, 1999
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99q3.htm#092899 

A message from Rocket eBook

The Open eBook Publication Standard was announced this past Tuesday morning. As one of the founding members of the Open eBook Authoring Group, NuvoMedia completely stands behind the Open eBook specifications. What the standard means to Rocket eBook users is more RocketEditions will be available! The standard makes it easier for publishers to provide content for Rocket eBook.

As a Rocket eBook owner, you will continue to read every RocketEdition you purchased prior to this specification. In the future, you will be able to read OEB-based RocketEditions as well as the current HTML-based RocketEditions. We will continue to support HTML-based RocketEditions so you can still create your own RocketEditions by downloading web pages or converting documents from applications that will save your documents in HTML such as Microsoft Word(R).

Rocket eBook upgrades to support OEB-based RocketEditions will be available as a simple download off of the Rocket eBook website. It’s as simple as downloading a book!

If you have any more questions regarding the Rocket eBook and the Open eBook standard, please refer to our FAQ at: http://www.rocket-ebook.com/Products/Faq/index.html 

A second message from Rocket eBook

ROCKET EBOOK: TOOL FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED Carol Wulster writes:

"I have not been able to read a book in five years due to MS and the affect it had on my vision, but I was able to read a computer screen. I first saw news about the Rocket in November 98, but felt it was too soon to buy. In May, an review in Slate magazine appeared. After reading it, I ordered a Rocket eBook. I had every intention of returning the eBook if it didn't work for me. Within five minutes of opening the package I as hooked. The combination of the large size font, the physical size of the page, and the backlight allow me to read without my vision doubling. A Miracle! I have become so passionate about my Rocket, that I want every title in the world in Rocket Format...."

-----Carol, thank you for your interest in the Rocket eBook! As you may know, the Rocket eBook comes with two default fonts, 10-point and 14-point. However, you can use the Rocket Librarian program to set the font style or size to any font you have on your PC (up to 28-point!). It is our sincere wish for the Rocket eBook to bring the gift of reading and writing to all those who are limited by conventional books!

A word of caution from Bob Jensen.  Even though I own a Rocket eBook, there are some advantages of Softbook and some huge advantages (as well as disadvantages) of the forthcoming Everybook.  Shop carefully if you are going to purchase an electronic book.  What I am really happy with is the ease with which you can create your own custom library and download any configuration of books whenever you want into your library from http://www.rocket-library.com/.  Each book takes roughly 20 seconds to download on a T1 line.  I also like the upgrade that allows me to hold 100 books in my Rocket eBook having a battery life of roughly 30 hours before recharging.  To make comparisons between Rocket eBook, Softbook, and Everybook Dedicated Reader, go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99.htm#Rocket 

October 12, 1999 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99q4.htm#101299 

I received the following message from Debra (Brown?) Messick. It may well be that Everybook will be the answer to many copyright concerns of authors. Given the new electronic book standards, it may well be that the library of the future will merely be an enormous database in which we can designate pointers (sometimes free and sometimes for a fee) for our own customized library table of books. At any time, we may then download at will from that table. My Rocket eBook now holds up approximately 100 books that I can download from my customized table of hundreds of pointers to books (most of which were free selections).

Dear Bob:

Thank you for your interest in the Everybook Dedicated ReaderTM (EB).

We will be offering two models of the EB: · A Professional model with a screen dimension of approximately 8-1/2" x 11" and · A Personal model with a screen dimension of approximately 6" x 9".

The EB Professional model is anticipated to be in full production in June of 2000. It will sell for approximately US $1,600. plus tax, shipping and handling. The EB has the potential to pay for itself over time because of the projected discounts the owner will receive on every book title purchased -- 25-40% off list. The more books you buy, the more quickly the EB pays for itself and then starts saving you money.

Some of the features of this model include: · Two screens-each with an approximate dimension of 8-1/2" x 11" · 24-bit color screens · A rendered image of approximately 300+dpi · Two full page touch screens for easy navigation · Full annotation capabilities (highlighting, margin notes, full-page notes) and search features (hypertext) · Digital audio · Digital video · Phone line, Internet access to browse and purchase (no PC needed) · Removable storage card (different size options) which hold up to 500,000 pages · Discounted book prices enabling the owner of an EB to make back their investment over time.

The Professional model is designed to optimally display professional trade journals, manuals and reference libraries as well as college textbooks. In addition, all artwork, complex schematic drawings, charts and tables are displayed in their original format and context.

Our second model, the Personal EB Dedicated Reader is anticipated to be available in late 2000. It will have virtually the same functionality of the Professional model, but will have two smaller screens - each with an approximate dimension of 6" x 9" - that almost meet in the center so that the book can be opened flat and read as one single screen. This allows the user to read reference-sized material in its original format one page at a time.

The most important advantages that Everybook has to offer are:

1. The Everybook Dedicated ReaderTM is the world's first true electronic book. The EB's full-page, two-screen display is 24-bit color and 300+dpi rendered resolution. The other eBooks are really tablets since they offer only one small screen, gray-scale, 72-105 dpi, and very limited storage capacity. You can store up to 200 fully illustrated reference books or 2,000 novels on each of the EB's removable storage cards and no PC is needed for downloading. There are no monthly fees or minimum purchases required.

2. The EB is the only eBook that supports PDF, the publishing industry's standard. The others, which use HTML, cannot display high-resolution photos, illustrations, charts, formulas, etc. With the EB, publishers need not pay to have books converted, since 90% of them already format their publications in PDF.

3. We are not striving to sell the EB to the "gadget" market. Our first model is geared toward professionals such as scientists, medical professionals, pharmacists, lawyers, engineers, architects, salespeople, business-to-business applications, and the military.

4. College students will be able to buy or lease an EB from their college bookstores. The EBs will come fully loaded with their textbooks, course packs, and required reading.

Nothing will ever truly replace the traditional book. Instead, we see the EB as the natural extension of the book, because it replicates all the things we love about books while adding mass storage, portability of your entire collection, frequent updating of information, and 24-hour-a-day access to the Everybook Store where you can browse, purchase, and download publications instantly. Book sales--and the number of titles available--will increase because titles will no longer go out of print or require a large market in order to make them profitable.

We have found wide acceptance of the EB because of its familiar dual-page layout, full-color images, and high-resolution display of page layouts in their original format. Publishers find that we understand their requirements and they appreciate the fact that we are the only eBook manufacturer that supports the PDF file format. We are not forcing a computer-based paradigm on them; instead, we studied their needs and built an electronic book system around them.

An estimated 90% of publishers have been electronically formatting their books in Adobe System's PDF file format for the production of traditional books. This makes PDF the de facto publishing industry standard for electronic books. Using PDF gives us access to the 10 to 15 years' worth of printed publications and eliminates the cost of conversion. We offer publishers a no-risk, low-cost distribution of their publications, with secure copyright protection, and sales incomes 60-90 days faster than current standards.

We plan to sell EBs directly from our web site, through professional associations, college bookstores, and through licensing agreements with entities such as corporations and the military.

If you have any additional questions, please feel free to write.

Regards, Debra G. Messick 
Sales Consultant
http://www.everybook.net/ 
717-939-3995 ext. 101

December 1, 1999 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99q4.htm#120199  

This is for Barry Rice and others interested in eBooks.  You can now purchase or rent them from netLibrary.  See http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A2356.cfm 

A veritable library of electronic books has been created on the Internet by netLibrary. At www.netlibrary.com you can search, view and borrow eBooks such as reference, scholarly, mass market and professional publications. The list of publishers providing content include: Grove's Dictionaries, Inc., Macmillan Ltd., National Academy Press, St. Martin's Press, The Brookings Institution and McGraw-Hill Companies, as well as many university presses such as Cambridge University Press, Columbia University Press, Duquesne University Press, University of Akron Press, University of California Press, University of North Carolina Press, New York University Press, Ohio University Press and Rutgers University Press.

The netLibrary provides the services of a traditional library in that patrons have the option of either borrowing the eBook and viewing it online, or viewing it offline by downloading it to their computer. Patrons will have to wait for eBooks that have been lent to other patrons before them. Some of the nation's major libraries are charter customers of netLibrary. Individuals and corporations may also become customers and check out what these cyber shelves hold. netLibrary, Boulder, CO, (303) 415-2548, www.netlibrary.com .

I might add that the Digital Duo on November 28 was not very complimentary of the Franklin's pioneering electronic books at http://www.franklin.com/.  These books require that you purchase tiny disks for at least $20 or more and have a very limited selection of books as opposed to Internet download books such as are available from netLibrary, Barnes & Noble, Rocket, etc.  Recall that my review of eBooks is in my July 30 Edition of New Bookmarks at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99.htm#Rocket 

January 11, 2000 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book00q1.htm#011100

Historical timeline of books --- http://www.microsoft.com/READER/press/timeline_past.htm 

Microsoft's view of history is biased.  No mention is made in the historical timeline of the pioneering Rocket E-Book and the subsequent Softbook Electronic Tablet and EveryBook.  See http://www.microsoft.com/READER/press/timeline_past.htm 

Microsoft Electronic Book Reader Software --- http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/press/1999/Aug99/SeyboldPR.htm 

Microsoft Reader is the first product to include ClearType™ font-rendering technology. Developed by Microsoft Research, ClearType greatly improves font resolution on LCD screens to deliver a paper-like display. Microsoft Reader also pays strict attention to the traditions and benefits of good typography. It offers a clean, uncluttered display; ample margins; proper spacing, leading and kerning; plus powerful tools for book-marking, highlighting and annotation. It includes a built-in dictionary as well as a Library that can store and manage a large collection of books and other documents. It also features a flexible copy-protection system that allows publishers to distribute titles with protection from piracy and illegal copying.

Various publishers, book vendors and e-Book pioneers have expressed support for Microsoft Reader. "Microsoft is to be applauded for helping enable meaningful on-screen reading," said Michael Lynton, chairman and CEO of Penguin-Putnam. "This technology gives publishers and authors a better opportunity to reach readers with their titles in an electronic medium."

"It is the dawn of the age of the e-Book," said Steve Riggio, vice chairman of Barnes & Noble. "Microsoft Reader will vastly improve the readability of content on PCs and laptops and bring it to an installed base of millions of readers."

In his keynote address at the Seybold SF '99 conference, Brass predicted Microsoft Reader would change the pace of electronic book adoption by enabling hundreds of millions of existing PCs and laptops to function as high-quality e-Books.

"In less than 15 years, more than half of all titles sold will be electronic," Brass told the conference audience in his address. "Advances in computer displays and storage have made electronic reading possible; Microsoft Reader will make it widespread and profitable."

"Until now, the lack of readability on a typical PC or note-Book display has been the biggest obstacle to the widespread adoption of emerging technologies, such as electronic books, that emphasize continuous, long-duration reading on screen." Brass said. "With Microsoft Reader and ClearType, authors and publishers will be able to present works of a very high quality, which consumers will be eager to purchase."

To ensure that customers have easy access to a wide range of titles for electronic reading, Microsoft is working closely with publishers, distributors, retailers and e-Book pioneers to establish standards that will nurture the fledgling electronic book industry. In October 1998, Microsoft joined with dozens of other industry leaders to create the Open e-Book Standard, which provides publishers with a common standard for formatting and preparing electronic titles.

Microsoft ClearType Overview 

http://www.microsoft.com/OpenType/cleartype/cleartypeq.htm 

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/links/News.asp?NID=956 

I may be wrong, but it is my understanding that the new Microsoft Reader for electronic books will read on a PC (in Windows Media Player using ClearType fonts) such that special electronic hardware devices such as the Rocket eBook, Softbook, and Everybook specialty reading devices will not be necessary).  Correct me if I am wrong on this.

From MIT:  How Microsoft's Amazing ClearType really works.

"Pixel Perfect," by Don Baker, Technology Review, June 2001

ClearType works through manipulation of the red, green and blue components of individual pixels (called "sub-pixels") to sharpen characters. To overcome color blurring, Microsoft developed an algorithm to filter sub-pixels based on their locations, illuminating those near a character's fringes differently than those at the center. The patent issued earlier this year is the first of more than 20 Microsoft expects to receive for the technology. "The importance of ClearType is that it lets us produce really readable type on existing hardware," says Microsoft researcher Bill Hill.

Armed with its first patent, Microsoft is strongly pushing ahead in deployment of ClearType. First released last August as part of Microsoft Reader software for electronic books, ClearType will appear in the next major release of Windows, future versions of the company's Pocket PC handheld computer, and a dedicated e-book device coming this summer.

Barnes & Noble deal with Microsoft--- http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB947175881851550760.htm 

Software giant Microsoft Corp. and online bookseller Barnesandnoble.com Inc. Thursday said they would create an online store stocked with electronic books viewable with Microsoft's new Reader software.

Barnesandnoble.com will open the "Microsoft Reader e-Book" store on its Web site by midyear. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

"The combination of barnesandnoble.com's online strength and Barnes & Noble's dominant retail presence will make Microsoft Reader available to tens of millions of book consumers in a matter of months," said Dick Brass, vice president of technology development for Microsoft.

Steve Riggio, vice chairman of Barnes & Noble Inc., which co-owns New York-based Barnesandnoble.com along with German media company Bertelsmann AG, said the bookseller envisions "a time in the not too distant future when there will be electronic versions of virtually every book in print."

From Syllabus Web on October 24, 2000

Reciprocal Integrates Microsoft Reader DRM

Reciprocal Inc., a leader in digital rights management (DRM) and digital commerce services, announced today that it has formed an alliance with Microsoft Corp. in which the two companies will offer an out-sourced DRM solution for e-book publishers. Reciprocal will integrate Microsoft's DRM solution, including the Digital Asset Server (DAS) product, into its Digital Clearinghouse infrastructure. DAS is Micro- soft's technology for providing secure distribution of eBooks in Microsoft Reader format. With this integration, Reciprocal hopes to answer demand from its network of publishers, e-tailers, and dis- tributors for the Microsoft Reader format. The partnership will provide publishers with an easy way to package and distribute content in a variety of secure ways with Microsoft DAS, and con- sumers with greater access to titles in the Microsoft Reader format.

Consumers can download Microsoft Reader at no charge at http://www.microsoft.com/reader/  (connect-time fees may apply).

April 11, 2000
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book00q2.htm#041100

Probably the most successful electronic book written to date was written by Stephen King while recovering from being hit by a car on a country road in Maine.  Recall that an electronic book can be downloaded from the Internet, but it must be downloaded into a device that will not allow printing or copying of any part of the text. 

Stephen King's electronic book was distributed free as a promotion of electronic books.  You can read more about the success of this electronic book in "A Thriller on the Net," Newsweek, March 27, 2000, pp. 46-47.  The online version of the Newsweek article is at http://newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/us/bz/a17498-2000mar18.htm

Folks in publishing are still trying to figure out what happened last week. One thing they think they know is that they've just seen the fastest-selling book of all time, Stephen King's "Riding the Bullet"—if you can call it "sales" when many of the first day's 400,000 copies were distributed free, and if you can call a downloadable but not printable electronic text a "book." The title of King's e-book-only story refers to a scary amusement-park ride. He wrote it while recuperating from being hit by a van last summer, with no special idea of how he'd publish it, so he didn't know how apt that title would prove. But e-books, which up to last week had seemed a niche market with distant possibilities, suddenly have a working mass-market model—almost working—and everybody's lining up for the thrill ride. Almost everybody.

Serialized Electronic Book Trends:  WSJ:  The Little Dickens

A serialized novel makes its way onto the pages -- and homepages -- of The Wall Street Journal.--- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,44135,00.html   

For the first time, The Wall Street Journal is serializing a novel -- Amanda.Bright@home  -- by journalist and author Danielle Crittenden. The first chapter debuted Memorial Day weekend in both the printed edition of the paper as well as at OpinionJournal.com. Subsequent chapters will be posted solely online now through Labor Day.

Crittenden, a frequent contributor to the Journal’s editorial page and author of the hotly debated nonfiction title What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, said that she is releasing the novel week by week. "I’m really doing it the way Dickens did -- sending it out while the ink is still wet -- or whatever the cyber version of wet ink is."

While Crittenden hopes the book will appear between covers one day, "the immediacy of writing directly for readers and bypassing the publishing process is exhilarating," she said. The print rights have not yet been sold and Crittenden made the deal to serialize Amanda.Bright@home directly with the Journal. Payment for each chapter is modest, the author said. "I’m getting about as much per chapter as I would get paid for an editorial column."

James Taranto, OpinionJournal's editor, said he is intrigued at the prospect of publishing serialized fiction online. "We're breaking new ground here. Amanda.Bright@home is a good read, and its tough-minded political and social commentary ought to appeal to our readers."

See also:
New Accounting for Best-Sellers
Pay to Publish, Pay for Review

May 15, 2000
WizeUp Electronic Textbooks

Question:  What should all instructors do at this very moment?  Answer
Answer:     See if their textbooks are now available as electronic books.  The list of available textbooks includes many of the leading textbooks of the world.

How do WizeUp electronic books differ from more traditional eBooks?

Have you adopted any textbooks that have become WizeUps?

Do you want to sell WizeUp textbooks (this one is a controversial matter of ethics?)

Dear Professor Jensen:

WizeUp.com would like to give you a new opportunity to introduce technology into your curriculum.

We are offering a new series of Digital Textbooks.  Our products bring together the textbooks you know and trust with the power of technology and the Internet.  We are working together with:

• Addison Wesley                                W. H. Freeman                                        South-Western College Publishing

• Allyn & Bacon                                   Harcourt College Publishers                     St. Martin's Press

• Bedford Books                                  Houghton Mifflin                                      Wadsworth Publishing Company

• The Dryden Press                              W. W. Norton                                          Worth Publishers

Our products can be used seamlessly with your curriculum.  The Digital Textbooks follow the printed textbooks page-by-page, graphic-by-graphic -- while bringing the power of digital technology and interactivity to your students.  Students can download the Digital Textbooks onto their computers.  They can take notes electronically, highlight key passages digitally, leverage powerful search capabilities, and work through interactive learning tools, multimedia enhancements, and other powerful features.

Our leading titles include textbooks from authors such as:

• Accounting            Warren, Reeve, Fess, and others

• Economics             Tucker, Tregarthen, Varian, Mansfield, Miller, and others

• Finance                  Brigham, Gapenski, and others

• Psychology            Myers, Hockenbury, Kagan, Segal, and others

• Sociology              Kendall, Andersen, Ferrante, and others

Call us to receive a free copy of your Digital Textbook (1-800-458-2627) and to find out if your title is available for Fall '00.  Call now before your summer begins.

Sincerely,

David Gray
Chief Executive Officer
WizeUp.com

WizeUp
90 William Street @ 1 Silicon Alley Plaza, Suite 506
New York, NY  10038
Telephone: (800) 458-2627
www.wizeup.com

Now there are over 100 titles available.  A sampling is shown below:

Business: Introductory Contemporary Business, Boone and Kurtz, 9th edition, Dryden Press, 1999. Computer Science: Programming Languages Introduction to Object Oriented Programming with C++, Millspaugh, 1st edition, Dryden, 1999. Data Structures and Problem Solving Using Java, Weiss, 1st edition, Addison Wesley Longman, 1998. Computer Science: Data Communications: Data Networks Networking Essentials: exam 70-058, Tittel, Hudson & Stewart, 1st edition, Coriolis, 1999. Economics: Principles of Macroeconomics Economics Today: The Macro View, Miller, 10th edition, Addison Wesley Longman, 1999. Economics: Intermediate Macroeconomics Introduction to Economic Growth, Jones, 1st edition, W.W. Norton, 1998. Economics: Microeconomics: Intermediate Managerial Economics Managerial Economics, Mansfield, 4th edition, W.W. Norton, 1998. Managerial Economics: Study Guide and Casebook, Mansfield and Mansfield. 4th edition, W.W. Norton, 1998. Engineering: General: Introductory Engineer's Toolkit: Microsoft Excel for Engineers, Etter, 1st edition, Addison Wesley Longman, 1995. Engineer's Toolkit: Engineering Design and Problem Solving, Howell, 1st edition, Addison Wesley Longman, 1995. Engineer's Toolkit: MATLAB 5.0 for Engineers, King, 1st edition, Addison Wesley Longman, 1998. English: Developmental/Remedial The Reading Edge, Johnson, 1st edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Finance: Corporate: Graduate Financial Management: Theory and Practice, Brigham, 9th edition, Dryden Press, 1999. Philosophy: Critical Thinking Critical Thinking, Epstein, 1st edition, Wadsworth, 1999. Workbook for Critical Thinking, Epstein, 1st edition, Wadsworth, 1999. Philosophy: Introductory Applying Ethics, Olen and Vincent, 6th edition, Wadsworth, 1999. Archetypes of Wisdom, Soccio, 3rd edition, Wadsworth, 1999. Psychology: Introductory Psychology, Myers, 5th edition, Worth, 1998. Psychology: An Introduction, Kagan and Segal, 8th edition, Harcourt College Publishers, 1995. Sociology: Introductory Sociology: Understanding A Diverse Society, Andersen, 1st edition, Wadsworth, 2000. Sociology: The United States in a Global Community, Ferrante, 4th edition, Wadsworth, 2000. Sociology in Our Times, Kendall, 2nd edition, Wadsworth, 1998. Sociology in Our Times, Essentials, Kendall, 2nd edition, Wadsworth, 1999. Sociology: Discovering Society, Stockard, 2nd edition, Wadsworth, 2000.

WizeUp will also let you sell their electronic books --- http://www.wizeup.com/affiliates/ 

WiZeUp.com will implement an affiliate network to enable you to sell digital textbooks in the very near future. We welcome you to join us in providing the world's first digital college textbooks for great students.

We intend to treat you as a partner in this relationship. So, we named this program PartnerNet ™, and encourage you to approach us in the same spirit.

In fact, we would be happy to open a dialogue with you regarding any aspect of PartnerNet. Simply contact us at partners@wizeup.com  and we will try to respond as soon as possible.

I can proudly declare that I will not sell to my own students as a matter of ethics.  However, suppose we work out a side deal between you, Professor XYZ, and me.  Your recommend that your students buy from me, and I will recommend that my students buy from you.  I think electronic books are a good idea.  Having professors contracted as "affiliates" to sell those books is a conflict of interest.

But publishing electronic books will be the wave of the future irrespective of how they are marketed.  For some time now I have argued that electronic textbooks will become commonplace.  However, the WizeUp books are not my idea of eBooks or "electronic books."  A Wizeup book takes no special device to read it or to prevent printing of a hardcopy version (printing is not possible in electronic books that require reading devices such as Rocket, Softbook, or Everybook.).  Here are some questions and answers about WizeUp.

Q: Can I print the book if I need to take it to class? A: Sure. Most publishers allow chapters of the book to be printed one time for your personal use.

Q: Can I install the book on more than one computer? A: Ah. Well actually, no. Though you're an honest person, there are lots of people out there who would make sure nobody ever had to buy the textbook if we allowed this. We'd sell one copy, and that would be the end.

Think of it this way -- would you like to work for us, let's say just a whimpy 12 hours per day (that's like a vacation at WiZeUp.com), for FREE? It's hard work, and you'll always come home tired, stressed, and have absolutely no life.

But hey, think of all the good you'd be doing the world by giving away great educational tools! Yeah right! Like that wouldn't suck.

The reality is that we work hard to develop the WiZeUp software. And we're a company, which means we need to make a profit to stay in business. Unfortunately, there are enough dishonest people out there that it makes things a little tougher on you.

As part of the copy protection, a WiZeUp book can only be installed on one hard drive, and comes with a single user license. Awfully sorry about that. We're wide open to suggestions if you can think of a way to make the textbook entirely digital so that it's a more efficient study tool -- and at the same time, allow multiple installations. Send ideas, we're listening!

Q: How can I re-sell a WiZeUp textbook? A: At this time, it is not possible to re-sell the electronic textbook. This is because of the copy protection mechanism mentioned above.

Here's the 411 on used books: Used textbooks make all textbooks cost more. Did you know that the author and the publisher do not receive any money on a used textbook sale?

Textbooks are incredibly difficult and expensive to create. It takes almost two years for the author and publisher to make a new textbook. A huge team of highly skilled professionals at several companies have to work together. This means it costs $ millions (believe it or not).

A new textbook is only new as long as there are no used books available. Used textbooks are 80% of the sales, and remember, the author and publisher don't make any money on a used textbook sale. By Spring semester it's all over for a book that was new in the Fall semester.

Because the publishing companies and authors don't see a dime on used textbook sales, the price for the new book has to go up. The publishers have just one shot at recovering the $ millions they spent during two years of work on the book and to make some profit. (Remember, they're in business so no profit = no company.)

We know -- and the publishers, authors and college bookstores know -- that textbooks are a big expense for you. Nobody's happy about this. The publisher takes a huge risk every time it wants to make a new book, and the profit level does not increase although costs of business increase. And you end up parting with more beer money than you want to think about. And bookstores need to keep offering used textbooks because students demand a less-expensive option than the new book.

We're on your side. We are working with our publishing partners and the college bookstores to find ways to make textbooks less expensive. Some of our partners are exploring ways to let you buy just the chapters you need, for example. Others are letting us give you a steeper discount. Stores are helping by providing information about WiZeUp digital textbooks to you and your professors, and making these products available through the stores' Web sites. It's kind of like the new, state of the art gym your student activity fees are paying for, but won't be finished until you've graduated. It will take some time, and your little brother or sister will get more out of it than you will. In the meantime, we're at least making a textbook that works better, so you get more value for your textbook dollar.

Q: What about tech support? A: Tech support is free, and you have the choice of 24-hour Web-based support or phone in.

Q: Can I buy only the chapters I need for a class? A: Yes, you can. As a matter of fact, WiZeUp.com and Thomson Learning released the world's first textbook that is available chapter-by-chapter in the Fall semester of 1999. This has proven to be a popular option, and we expect a growing number of titles from our publishing partners to feature this money-saving option. Check the individual textbook information page at WiZeUp.com to find out if your digital textbook is available on a chapter-by-chapter basis.

Q: I downloaded and installed the Drop/Add Test Drive. How do I...? A: You can so some really cool things with WiZeUp. Check out the animated tutorial. You will need the Macromedia Flash Plug-in. WiZeUp software also includes extensive, searchable help and context-sensitive help (that means if you right-click your mouse, you can get to help about the thing you're pointing to).

Update on August 29, 2000
WizeUp requests that I be more accurate in my evaluation of their services.  

WizeUp requests that I be more accurate in my evaluation of their services.  My main complaint concerned the ethics of allowing professors to both adopt and sell leading textbooks online.  The latest version of the WizeUp website seems to be playing down that option for professors relative to earlier versions of the website.  Now I am happy to encourage students and faculty to make use of this wonderful way to purchase top academic textooks.

Other than that, I think that it is great that WizeUp is providing over 100 leading textbooks from almost every discipline online (it amazes me how they got the leading publishing houses to partner with WizeUp for this purpose.)  It great that these leading textbooks can be obtained in digital form for ease of storage, ease of access, ease of word search, and price.  

Different universities and bookstores offer different types of programs and pricing to students and the markets and prices are often complex and they often change.

Generally, WizeUp Digital Textbooks are currently priced at $10 below the used book - some of our Digital Textbooks are priced at $20 below the used book.

In the digital form, you can take notes, highlight, make bookmarks, and search.  My evaluation is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm#051500   Especially note the FAQs at http://www.wizeup.com/instructors_faq.html 

Reply to Jennifer Johnson, WizeUp Digital Textbooks
I will be out of town a great deal this semester. What would be better is for you to write a correcting message that you would like to have me put in my work. If I agree with your corrections (and I will probably trust your judgment more than my judgment), I will publish your corrections.

Bob (Robert E.) Jensen 
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212 
Voice: (210) 999-7347 Fax: (210) 999-8134 Email: rjensen@trinity.edu  
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen 

-----Original Message----- From: Jennifer Johnson [mailto:jenjohnson2000@earthlink.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2000 9:54 PM To: rjensen@trinity.edu Subject: (no subject)

Professor Jensen,

I read with interest the coverage of our company on your Website. I am the National Sales Manager for WizeUp and I would be happy to provide you with accurate information for your site.

It was a little difficult to follow, but the inaccuracies may discourage professors or student users. I would like our local rep to be able to meet with you for a demonstration of the product this semester. Would you be available?

I look forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience.

Jennifer Johnson WizeUp Digital Textbooks (212) 324-1300 x 1021 jjohnson@wizeup.com 

Update on January 16, 2001

What has always impressed me with WizeUp is how they persuaded the leading textbook publishers to allow WizeUp to distribute their top textbooks as downloads into PCs (with software that allows one print copy) at substantial savings to students.  I received the following message from WizeUp on January 15, 2001:

WIZEUP DIGITAL TEXTBOOKS AND COLLEGES.COM ANNOUNCE PARTNERSHIP TO PROVIDE E-LEARNING PRODUCTS TO THE MASSES

NEW YORK, NY, January 16, 2001 -- Today, WizeUp Digital Textbooks (WizeUp), and Colleges.com announced a joint marketing agreement to promote WizeUp's e-learning products to students across the country through the numerous on and off-line properties owned and operated by Colleges.com.

WizeUp's e-learning products will be offered to Colleges.com's users through the Colleges.com web site (www.colleges.com), "word of the day" e-newsletters, U-Magazine and the College Press Network. Concurrently, WizeUp will promote Colleges.com as the leading content provider for college students by showcasing Colleges.com's unique content on www.wizeup.com.

WizeUp is the leading provider of Digital Textbooks and Study Guides in the higher education market. WizeUp offers the top selling textbooks in association with the world's leading higher education publishers including McGraw-Hill; Thomson; Harcourt; Pearson; and Bedford, Freeman & Worth. WizeUp products allow students to search, sort and manage the educational content much faster than with print-based materials. The e-learning products are in great demand as professionals and students who are under pressure to acquire new skills need new computer-based, interactive tools for gaining those skills-faster, better and cheaper. As a result, distance learning and on-line training is expected to experience exponential growth over the next three years. According to International Data Corporation, the number of students enrolled in distance-learning courses is growing 30% annually. Over 80% of all higher education institutions will offer distance learning by 2002.

Colleges.com is an extensive network of on-line and off-line properties that provides unparalleled promotional opportunities for its partners and advertisers. The web property, www.colleges.com , will offer the entire WizeUp catalog of products, which is the largest catalog of digital textbooks in the world.

"Colleges.com and its associated properties allow WizeUp to step up our promotional efforts from our target 250 schools to thousands of schools across the country," said David Gray, CEO of WizeUp. "The age of Digital Textbooks is here and Colleges.com will help us bring these advanced learning tools to the masses."

"This deal gives Colleges.com another avenue to actively support and participate in the new world of e-learning," said John Carrieri, CEO of Colleges.com. "WizeUp is the first mover in the digital textbook space and we look forward to expanding the exposure and benefits of digital textbooks to students."

About WizeUp: Based in New York City, WizeUp Digital Textbooks ( www.wizeup.com ) is the leading developer of digital educational content-including digital textbooks, training materials, and other related educational content-for both the higher education and corporate marketplaces. The company is dedicated to serving the educational community with innovative new E-learning solutions. Additional information is available by visiting www.wizeup.com.

About Colleges.com Colleges.com, the parent company of U. Magazine and the College Press Network is an interactive web site focused on providing college and university specific information, financial aid and e-commerce. Other services include a college search engine listing over 4,600 colleges and universities, a scholarship search engine offering 2 billion in awards and a price-comparison engine that compares on-line retailer textbook prices. Colleges.com also owns and publishes U. Magazine, the most widely read lifestyle and entertainment magazine among sixteen to twenty-four year-olds, with a circulation of over 1.5 million. U. Magazine is the only national college magazine written for college students by college students. It is currently distributed at more than 250 four-year colleges and universities nationwide. The College Press Network is a leading provider of advertising and on-line content for over sixty on-line college newspapers. Colleges.com is privately held and is headquartered in San Diego, CA.

I added the following to my threads on February 15, 2001 

"Textbooks Go Online," T.H.E. Journal, February 2001, p. 14 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3294.cfm 
McGraw-Hill Education and WizeUp Digital Textbooks have formed a joint initiative to electronically publish, sell and distribute digital textbooks for the higher education market. Students will be able to view the education titles online with password-protected access, or download the book directly to a computer. The titles integrate seamlessly into course management technology systems such as Web CT and Blackboard, and allow the professor to link the textbook content to classroom presentation materials. Interactive technology allows students to search texts, take and manage notes, create hyperlinks and bookmarks, and electronically highlight text. WizeUP, New York, NY, www.wizeup.com.

---

Email message on February 7 from Jonathan Kowit 

Allyn & Bacon and WizeUp Launch Digital Textbook Initiative for the Higher Education Market

New York - February 7, 2001 - Allyn & Bacon, a division of Pearson Education, and WizeUp Digital Textbooks announced today the first major initiative to electronically publish, sell and distribute digital textbooks in education and social sciences for the higher education market.

For the first time, titles such as Allyn & Bacon's Psychology by Philip Zimbardo; Educational Psychology by Robert Slavin; Social Psychology by Robert Baron and Donn Byrne; Living Sociology by Claire Renzetti and Daniel Curran; and other titles in the social sciences will be available in digital format. There have been a number of initiatives to develop digital content for business, technology, and other “hard” sciences. This initiative marks the first major effort in the “soft” sciences where Allyn & Bacon is the market leader.

Initial trials of the program conducted this past fall with key professors, such as Richard Jackson at Boston College, who uses Allyn & Bacon’s Exceptional Learners: Introduction to Special Education, by Daniel P. Hallahan and James M. Kauffman, proved to be extremely successful.

“I’m predicting in five years that all curriculum resources will be available digitally,” said Professor Jackson.

WizeUp has developed the most advanced technology in the e-Publishing marketplace with highly sophisticated features and functions. WizeUp Digital Textbooks are unique in ensuring the pedagogical integrity of the books as developed by the publishers. The Digital Textbooks follow the printed version page-by-page, graphic-by-graphic while bringing the power of interactive technology and the Internet to the students. WizeUp Digital Textbooks, which are available via Internet download or on the web, include features such as: powerful search capabilities, in-context note-taking and notes-management tools, custom hyperlinking, bookmarking and electronic highlighting capabilities.

“Our alliance with WizeUp demonstrates our commitment to developing e-learning solutions for the higher education marketplace-in particular for the soft sciences,” said Sandi Kirshner, President of Allyn & Bacon. “These products will make an immediate impact in technology-based learning environments, where digital textbooks will expand the classroom and offer students a powerful and efficient learning solution.”

The combination of the widely utilized and respected content from Allyn & Bacon and the e-learning tools supplied by WizeUp benefits all of today’s learning environments-traditional, online, distance learning, continuing education and corporate education. The evolution of the textbook into a complete e-learning solution gives students and professors unprecedented educational power, making both studying and teaching more effective, more efficient and more dynamic.

Allyn & Bacon and WizeUp have developed innovative pricing packages designed to capture market share in technology-based academic environments, including: distance learning, laptop universities and other educational technology based student populations.

"Students will enrich their learning experience with the powerful combination of Allyn & Bacon’s highly recognized content and WizeUp's e-learning tools. This will allow students to meet their academic goals and gain an edge in our increasingly competitive society,” said Stephen Jordan, Vice President of Publishing for WizeUp.

About WizeUp:

Based in New York City, WizeUp Digital Textbooks is the leading developer of digital educational content-including digital textbooks, training materials, and other related educational content-for both the higher education and corporate marketplaces. The company is dedicated to serving the educational community with innovative new E-learning solutions. Additional information is available by visiting www.wizeup.com.

About Pearson Education:

Pearson Education is the world's leading integrated education business. Pearson Education offers a full range of rich content across electronic and print media for all students everywhere, from early childhood to professional education and training. Pearson Education's leading brands include: Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley, Longman, Allyn & Bacon, Scott Foresman, Pearson Learning, NCS Learn, and NCS Pearson. Pearson Education is the global education publishing business of Pearson plc, the international media group. For more information, visit www.pearsoned.com.

Contact: Wendy Spiegel Pearson Education 212.782.3482 wendy.spiegel@pearsoned.com 

Jonathan Kowit WizeUp Digital Textbooks 212.324.1300 jkowit@wizeup.com 

 

Update on March 2, 2001:  Barnes & Noble Wizes Up

Barnes & Noble College Bookstores will actively market WizeUp Digital Textbooks at many of the colleges and universities it serves through both in-store and cyber-store promotions. The promotions include sampling of collateral materials, displays, product placement, promotional shelf-talkers and other co-branded signage, Internet marketing, and seamless e-commerce integration between the two companies for specific university class programs.

WizeUp Digital Textbooks produces digital editions of some of the largest and most prestigious college textbooks that professors use in classrooms around the country every day. Applying its advanced e-publishing technology to the printed textbook, WizeUp has been able to establish partnerships with virtually every major publisher in higher education including Pearson Education, Thomson Learning, Harcourt College Publishers, McGraw Hill, among others.

WizeUp follows the printed textbooks page-by-page, graphic-by-graphic, but provides students with technological features such as a powerful search tool, electronic note taking, a digital highlighter, bookmarking for creating custom hyperlinks, and additional multimedia enhancements and capabilities. WizeUp produces textbooks across virtually every major discipline including liberal arts, sciences, and business.

About WizeUp Based in New York City, WizeUp Digital Textbooks ( www.wizeup.com ) is the leading developer of digital educational content-including digital textbooks, training materials, and other related educational content-for both the higher education and corporate marketplaces. The company is dedicated to serving the educational community with innovative new e-learning solutions. Additional information is available by visiting www.wizeup.com. 

Beth Taylor [btaylor@wizeup.com] 

January 29, 2001

The software publisher says it's a textbook marketing mistake to expect people to read their favorite fiction on a handheld device, so instead the company plans to concentrate on digital reference materials --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,41249,00.html 

Adobe announced the release of its new e-book software, the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader 2.0. Adobe also unveiled version 2.0 of the Adobe Content Server, a system that secures and prepares Adobe PDF files for online distribution and purchase.

"We don't necessarily think that that's the narrow range where e-books should be pigeonholed," said Kevin Nathanson, group product manager for Adobe e-books. "We look at it as part of a much broader universe."

Adobe said that BarnesandNoble.com will feature a range of new Adobe PDF-based e-books on their e-book website. Adobe will also sell books on its own e-books website.

Adobe entered the e-book fray in 2000 with its purchase of e-book software developer Glassbook.

But Adobe is taking a different approach from competitors such as Microsoft. It will go after two target markets where it thinks e-books have the most value: the higher education market and the mobile professional.

Adobe is targeting students and business workers with Internet-connected computers. They may not read an entire textbook or research report, but could readily use e-books to search multiple books, take notes or highlight text.

"We believe that the early adopters are people who have a value for time saving, and reducing the bulk of papers they lug around," said Michael Looney, Adobe's senior director of e-books.

So instead of focusing on the latest bestsellers, Adobe is bargaining with publishers to produce content that's usually considered reference material.

Analysts say that's the right approach.

"We see those as the growth markets that are going to bleed over into the consumer market," said IDC analyst Malcolm Maclachlan.

While rivals Microsoft (MSFT) and RCA/Thomson race to convert titles into their respective e-book reader formats, Adobe hopes to appeal to publishers who have already published content in its Portable Document Format (PDF).

"The vast majority of books that are printed today already exist in PDF," Nathanson said. "There's a virtual universe of compelling content that's available in the file format."

Electronic pages captured in PDF look just as they would on paper, preserving all the fonts, graphics and layout. PDF files can be read by Windows and Macs.

"If (a publisher) already (has files stored in) PDF, you have a pretty good e-book right off the bat," Nathanson said. "The costs of conversion are practically nil."

May 15, 2000 http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book00q2.htm#051700 

Bob:

I just signed a contract with www.softlock.com . as a Content Provider for of electronic accounting textbooks. Softlock.com is the company that broug