Dostoevsky, meet Dungeons & Dragons: Can video games promote reading?

In another installment in its series about the future of reading, the New York Times ran a piece this week about the tie ins between video games and books that some publishers and authors are beginning to explore. One author of a science fiction book for teens remarks:
“You can’t just make a book anymore,” [...]

How to Disrupt Class: Throw the book out the window!

In a book published this summer, the business guru, Harvard professor and author of the best selling book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma” Clay Christensen, turns his analytical lens to the education sector and offers some compelling arguments about how best to reform it. His new book is called Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the [...]

Plastic Logic unveils E-reader that’s everything Kindle isn’t

At the Demofall08 conference that was held this week in San Diego, (”72 companies. Each with six minutes to show their product to the world. It doesn’t get any more straightforward and fast paced than that.”) a company named Plastic Logic introduced a new type of e-reader that looked like it featured nearly everything the [...]

When Irish Eyes Are Smiling: Schoolkids Get Free E-Readers

The country that gave the world U2, Guiness beer, and the shamrock also seems to be on the cutting edge of educational technology, according to a story in Thursday’s Irish Times:
A GROUP of 18 secondary school pupils yesterday became the first students worldwide to replace their academic books with electronic devices. The first year students of [...]

PIRG claims e-textbooks are due for “Course Correction”

In a stinging critique of its recent foray into the field of digital textbooks, the publishing industry was taken to task in a report released this week  by the Student Public Interest Research Group. The study, entitled, “Course Correction: How Digital Textbooks Are Off Track, and How to Set Them Straight”, outlines the findings of [...]

E-books in education: One publisher’s perspective

The Association of Educational Publishers sponsors a blog called: Publishing for the Digital Future, which is a collection of essays, articles and opinion pieces that analyze the impact of the digital age on the field of educational publishing. In a recent post, the CEO of Evan Moor Educational Publishers offers up a number of questions [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]