NY Times asks: “R U Really Reading Online?”

Yesterday The Times ran an article on Page One that was the first of a series that will investigate how the internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read. The article features several families with children who prefer to read on the Web rather than with books, [...]

Sony’s E-reader opens up, sort of

The buzz in the e-book world is all about Sony’s announcement this week of its forthcoming support for a more open standard of e-books, called “e-pub”:
From Gizmodo:
A firmware update scheduled to drop later this week will allow Sony Readers to use the .epub format, an open standard (with DRM support) that has the backing of [...]

Ars Technica asks: “What about the kids?”

In an opinion piece posted July 20 on Ars Technica, Don Reisinger continues to feed the rumor mill about new versions of the Kindle coming this fall and next year (first reported by Crunchgear on July 15). It’s interesting how a story based on an unnamed source (a search on the string ” Kindle [...]

Does “Reading First” put reading last?

Several weeks ago the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to eliminate funding for the Reading First program, the groundbreaking but controversial Bush administration program that has given states $1 billion a year since 2002 to teach low-income elementary schoolers to read. A House committee also had voted to eliminate funding; if money is not restored [...]

College Textbook Economics 101: Pay, or Pirate and Party?

With a new semester starting in a little over a month, the media is full of coverage of the cost of textbooks, and what publishers, colleges and students are doing about it. As you might expect, the solutions and strategies vary depending on which segment of the market they are coming from.
The first article comes [...]