Freeloaders unite! YAFTOS is here(Yet another free textbook online site)

Readers of this blog have seen references in earlier posts to a couple of start-ups in the free e-book space, notably Flatworld Knowledge, (www.flatworldknowledge.com ) and Wowio (www.wowio.com) Well it turns out another company has been doing it for several years. Actually, it could be argued that this company originated the concept of free college [...]

Steal This Book! – An E-Book Experiment in Building Buzz

Chris Anderson’s Blog http://www.longtail.com/, which discusses aspects of his bestselling 2006 book of the same name, recently wrote about an experiment that Random House’s Crown Books imprint tried with a new release. It offered a free download of Infected, by Scott Sigler for a four day period before the actual book went on sale at [...]

Happy Earth Day. Save a tree – read an e-book

In keeping with the theme of Earth Day, it seems appropriate to examine the carbon footprint of the book publishing industry. Every year about 20-million trees are cut down to produce the virgin paper for books sold in the United States alone. Here’s an interesting commentary on this topic:
College students purchase about a tree per [...]

Tarzan Economics: It’s a jungle out there…

There have been an increasing number of posts recently about the availability (or lack of) textbooks in Kindle or similar e-book format. Here’s a post that appeared this week on the Amazon customer forum:
I emailed Pearson, one of the largest publisher of textbooks in the world, asking why most of their books were not [...]

Reading the fine print: “Amsterdam” on a Blackberry?

An interesting commentary on how e-books are infiltrating all sorts of gadgets appeared in today’s Wall Street Journal Portals column. Lee Gomes, in remarking that he was actually reading Ian McEwan’s novel “Amsterdam” on his Blackberry, observed: Contrary to all of my previous expectations, not only was I reading the novel on my cellphone, [...]

You Tube: A Vision of K-12 Students Today

Notice how much time they spend reading a book…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A-ZVCjfWf8&feature=related

More helpful Kindle links, and Welcome to the “Free” World…

The world of Kindle resources continues to expand. Here are two worth bookmarking, especially for aspiring authors and self-publishers:
http://kindlehomepage.blogspot.com/
http://indiekindle.blogspot.com/, which describes itself as “a resource for readers, authors, and indie publishers oriented generally but not exclusively around the amazing Amazon Kindle”. The blog is maintained by Stephen Windwalker, author of several books and articles about [...]

Open Source + Open Books = Open Minds

Today I signed a virtual document called The Open Education Declaration, (www.capetowndeclaration.org)  which was initiated at a meeting in Cape Town in September 2007. Particicipants included Jimbo Wales of Wikipedia and Rich Baraniuk of Connexions, two individuals who have played a major role in the open source movement. Jimmy started with his popularly generated encyclopedia. [...]

HarperCollins’ Dips its toe in the Digital Pool

As they say, everything old is new again. Remember back in the 80s, GM created the Saturn Car company, whihch was meant to be completely separate from and autonomous of its parent? This was ostensibly so it would not be contaminated by the practices that had brought GM’s market share hurtling towards the Yugo’s. It [...]

Freeing the Book from the Ties that Bind It…

Recent posts on this space and others devoted to e-books underscore the simple facts that knowledge wants to be free, and that there are forces at work that will inevitably result in a greater distribution of information at a lower cost to a larger number of consumers. We’ve already seen what took place in the [...]