Announcing the KindlesforKids Scholarship Program!

As the first step in its mission to provide e-books for everyone, Connect2Books is pleased to announce that we are sponsoring a scholarship program to donate Kindles to deserving students who are in financially challenging circumstances. Successful candidates will be awarded a Kindle along with a credit for $100 worth of e-books from Amazon’s Kindle [...]

One Million Books available for Kindle??

Since many readers are under the impression that the only content that can be obtained in Kindle format is that which is purchased from Amazon, the thread from the Kindle discussion board below sheds some light on the subject. The original post was made on Dec 20, and there’s been a fair number of replies [...]

E-Books everywhere: Read maps and books on the same device

More driver distractions:
Engadget reports today that MD Sound introduced a Personal Navigation Device (PND) that allows the user to listen to mp3 files, view pictures, view videos, navigate the continental United States and read e-books, all on a 4.3 inch touch screen. As if yakking and texting on cell phones wasn’t enough of a distraction, [...]

The Weight: Whoopi raves about the Kindle

Not being a regular viewer of ABC’s morning talk show, The View, I missed the episode on February 13, in which Whoopi Goldberg did essentially a two minute promo for the Kindle (which probably only exacerbated the backorder problem). What was noteworthy however, was not that she was such a believer in the product, but [...]

Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias…NY Times

A piece in Sunday’s New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/weekinreview/16ncohen.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=weekinreview
hints that the veritable leather-bound sets of encyclopedias that lined the bookshelves of many families (and libraries) for generations may be going the way of the Viewmaster and the Fuller Brush Man. One statistic that brings the trend home is that sales of Encyclopedia Britannica, the Rolls Royce [...]

Chicken/Egg dilemma: Textbook publishers rejected by the digital world?

In an article appearing in the March 10 issue of  the Michigan State U student paper, the author quotes a couple of publishing industry executives with diverging observations on the future of e-textbooks on college campuses:
Some of the weight of textbooks and course packets could be lifted off the backs of students if some textbook [...]

Cracks in the (UK’s) Publishing Industry’s Armor…

There are some signs that the publishing industry is slowly beginning to get one foot out of the 19th century and into the 21st century. In an item under the headline “Fiction for Free from Penguin”, theBookseller.com reports:
Penguin is to offer free downloads of the first chapter of every fiction title it publishes.The publisher has [...]

News Flash: Book lovers have emotional bond with paper

As reported by Ars Technica on March 4, (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080211/aqm136.html?.v=27), people are more attached to their books than they are to their satellite television, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, social networks, video games, blogs, DVDs, and P2P file-swapping. And it’s not like this high rate of affection for the book occurs only among a small group; books [...]

Textbook Publishers: Prepare for a Flat World- This is huge…

Today, I learned about an organization that promises to do for (or to) the textbook publishing industry what MP3s and iTunes have done to the traditional music business: create disruption and disintermediation. The organization is called CK-12, a non-profit organization launched in 2006, and it aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the [...]

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?

An interesting piece in the February 29th Wall Street Journal examines the differences between the US educational system and that of Finland, which consistently places far above the USA on an international academic test (The Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA.) Finnish students earned some of the top scores by 15 year-old [...]