Kindle hacks, freebies and shortcuts: 100 + useful links

It’s a sure sign that a new piece of technology is moving from the fringes to the mainstream when it’s possible to find more than a hundred sites that link to it or refer to it in some way. This one – Hack Your Kindle 100+ Tips, Resources and Tutorials to Get More Out of [...]

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Digital textbooks: The old (new) college try

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but barely six months after it was introduced, the Kindle is starting to become the “textbook of the future”. As reported this week in The Christian Science Monitor and Inside HigherEd, a handful of university presses are starting to put some titles on the Kindle:
This fall, Princeton [...]

Amazon E-Book Sales to Hit $2.5B in 2012?(Hear that Steve?)

Last month at Book Expo America, I heard Jeff Bezos say that Amazon had been selling e-books for nearly ten years and that they needed an electron microscope to find the sales figures. Well they may not need one much longer, if Pacific Crest analyst Steve Weinstein’s projections are valid. He estimates that global sales [...]

bitTorrent, e-books and piracy – NYT Tech guru David Pogue’s experiment

For the last month or so, David Pogue, the New York Times technology columnist, has been posting his views on the debate surrounding the effect of ebooks on sales of the dead-tree variety. He’s one the technology world’s most prolific authors, having created the “Missing Manual” series of user-friendly help books. Every time a new [...]

Paul Krugman, the Grateful Dead and copyright: “Just tape it!”

It’s a strange and brave new world when you can read the noted economist and NY Times op-ed contributor Paul Krugman quoting tech guru Esther Dyson, who proclaims that the Grateful Dead are the creative harbingers of the age of digital media. In a recent column, he explains how she predicted, before the widespread adoption [...]

More Pleasure Reading Than We Suspected? – P.S. to Scholastic Report

More commentary on Scholastic’s Family Reading Report, released earlier this week, this time from Tim Shanahan, a widely recognized and published academic in the field of youth literacy and learning. Among his observations on the report are the following:
The major reason that they say they don’t read for pleasure is because they have other [...]

Welcome to the Age of the Wikitext!

An interesting item in May/June issue of Multimedia & Internet @ Schools on the future of the textbook, in a world of Web 2.0 education:
Now let’s get some perspective. Let’s say you were in college in 1978. When you received an assignment, you would use reference books and journals in the library to do your [...]

Scholastic 2008 Kids and Reading Report Results

This week marked the release of the bi-annual study of trends among kids and reading in the U.S. Some of the study’s findings are below:

After age eight, more children go online daily than read books for fun daily.
Two thirds of kids age 9-17 believe that within the next 10 years, most books which are read [...]

Unbound, undone, and unplugged: Publishing in America

You can always count on The Economist for a cogent and succinct analysis of an important trend or development that promises to change the way either producers or consumers act. In last week’s issue, they turned their attention to the U.S. book publishing industry, with a piece covering Jeff Bezo’s announcement at BEA that Kindle [...]