"The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has accused Educause, a higher education IT association, and technology community Internet2 of ignoring the "accessibility barriers" that are preventing blind and print-disabled students from fully participating in a major e-text pilot initiative being coordinated by both."

""There is no e-reader that supports what we found these students doing," said first author Alex Thayer, a UW doctoral student in Human Centered Design and Engineering. "It remains to be seen how to design one. Its a great space to get into, theres a lot of opportunity.""

"In the good-old days when print was the only option, students had plenty of free or cheap ways to get required textbooks. Borrow one from a friend. Check out a copy from the library. Buy a used copy for a fraction of the price. Or rent a copy through one of several companies providing that service. But the latest textbook enhancements, which require individual access codes to get to bonus materials online, threaten to displace all of those alternatives. Most access codes are good only for a limited time, and once they are activated they can't be used by other students."

"An electronic edition comprised of a selection of scholarly reflections from doctoral candidates on the Digital Arts & Humanities Ph.D. programme, which is part of the Digital Academy at University College Cork, Ireland."

" Unfortunately, in the case of Mike Tracy, a highly-regarded animator who'd been teaching at the Art Institute of California-Orange County for the past 11 years, refusing to make students buy an e-book they don't need may have cost him his job."

"Several universities have recently tried a new model for delivering textbooks in hopes of saving students money: requiring purchase of e-textbooks and charging students a materials fee to cover the costs. A recent report on some of those pilot projects, however, shows that many students find the e-textbooks "clumsy" and prefer print."

"A group of graduate students at the Milledgeville, Ga.-based campus have used Apple's iBookstore to publish a video-and-image-laden eTextbook filled with information and advice for educators hoping to better incorporate technology in their everyday classroom lessons. The eBook, "Using Technology in Education," is a student-created textbook available for the iPad and available for free in the iBookstore, "

"The aim of Inquire is to provide students with the world's first intelligent textbook, says its creator David Gunning of Seattle-based Vulcan. At first glance, the system just looks like an electronic version of Campbell Biology, the tome that forms the bedrock of biology classes for first-year university and advanced high school students in the US. But behind the scenes is a machine-readable concept map of the 5000 or so ideas covered in the book, along with information on how they are all related."

"When Georgia's need-based HOPE grant for technical college students stopped helping them pay for textbooks last year, administrators at South Georgia Technical College decided to take matters into their own hands. The college announced three weeks ago that starting this fall, it will provide students with free textbooks for each of their courses -- a program that President Sparky Reeves said he hopes will be paid for by tuition revenue brought in by additional students."

"The Humble School, which serves needy children in a part of Africa ravaged by poverty and HIV, is on the front lines of an effort to reinvent developing world literacy programs with technology. The premise is that the new economics of digital publishing might make more and better books available in classrooms like Mr. Opio's."

"The Association of American Publishers released a report today that shows that ebooks have beaten hardcover revenues for the first time. Ebook revenues topped out at $282.3 million YTD while hardcovers hit $229.6. "

"Boundless, a Boston-based start-up that makes textbooks available for free on-line by curating information from Wikipedia, government publications, Creative Commons licenses and other free sources. In April, Boundless raised its second round of venture capital funding-$8 million from a group led by Venrock. Not surprisingly, Boundess has also raised the hackles of publishers. In March Pearson Education, Inc., Cengage Learning Inc; and Macmillian Higher Education filed a suit charging Boundless with copyright infringement-a claim it denies"

"The interactive e-book publisher Inkling has finally released an HTML5 version of its app, meaning that its 150 titles are now available on both the iPad and the Web."

tablet/ e-reader ownership among US adults up to 29% (2 % less than 3 yrs ago)

Profile of leader of IU Etexts initiative

"Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers Inc has reached a deal with more than 70 percent of its creditors to cut $3.1 billion in debt as it faces a lagging textbook market due to drops in educational funding. The publisher said it plans to restructure through a pre-packaged, court-supervised Chapter 11 bankruptcy."