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"Jutoh makes it easy to create ebooks in popular formats that you can sell on many ebook sites, including Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iBooks. Create your project in seconds from existing files using the New Project Wizard; or create your book from scratch using the built-in styled text editor. "

Why don't students like electronic textbooks if they like ebooks? The two differ. Ebooks typically often have a narrative structure,  they are usually pretty easy to read, and we read them for pleasure. Textbooks in contrast, have a hierarchical structure, the material is difficult and unfamiliar, and we read them for learning and retention. Students likely interact with textbooks differently than books they read for pleasure.

Last month at the Digital Book World conference in New York, Kelly Gallagher, VP, publishing services at R.R. Bowker, revealed that 74% of book buyers have never bought an eBook. To help make the transition smoother, we've put together a list together to demystify eReaders.

The preview version of the TechWatch report entitled Preparing for Effective Adoption and Use of eBooks in Education is now available. We invite feedback on this report produced by JISC Observatory, to help shape its coverage and guidance to the Higher and Further Education sectors. The feedback period is open from 27 September to 8 October 2012.

"Readium, a project of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) and supporters, is an open source reference system and rendering engine for EPUB publications. EPUB is the industry-standard open format for eBooks and digital publications. The latest version, EPUB 3, is based on Web Standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, and the DOM. The overall aim of the Readium project is to ensure that open source software for handling EPUB 3 publications is readily available, to accelerate adoption of EPUB 3 as the universal, accessible, global digital publishing format. Readium is built on WebKit , the embeddable open source Web content engine."

An open source rendering app to promote epub as an ebook standard. Works as a Google Chrome extension.

"After all we (as a society not libraries) did not get the first sale doctrine out of the goodness of someone's heart, it came from a court case. Maybe we need to stop asking. It wouldn't be the first time."

A good summary of the state of the ebook business and libraries.

"If you don't have DRM, it opens up strategies that aren't available to you if you insist on DRM," says Shatzkin. "The question is: Is the fear of piracy greater than the fear of Amazon?"

"MindTap is well beyond an eBook, a homework solution or digital supplement, a resource center website, a course delivery platform or a Learning Management System. More than 70% of students surveyed said it was unlike anything they have seen before. MindTap is a new personal learning experience that combines all your digital assets - readings, multimedia, activities, and assessments- into a singular learning path to improve student outcomes."

Textbooks By Course | New & Used Books, eBooks, Rent Books Help your student body save big on textbooks. Create a completely free textbook exchange to let students trade books to each other.

"eCub is a cross-platform tool for creating EPUB and MobiPocket books. EPUB is become a popular e-book standard and is open and free for all to implement. EPUB files can be read by MobiPocket, Adobe Digital Editions, FBReader, Stanza, the Sony Reader, and many other readers and applications. MobiPocket books can be read on desktop platforms, mobile platforms and the Amazon Kindle e-book reader."

"In that model, the institution negotiates a deep discount off the list price of the textbook in order to have access to an e-text edition. In return for the discount, the university guarantees that every single student in the course will buy the e-text, which is charged like a lab fee."

"In that model, the institution negotiates a deep discount off the list price of the textbook in order to have access to an e-text edition. In return for the discount, the university guarantees that every single student in the course will buy the e-text, which is charged like a lab fee. This is a definite change from the current textbook model, in which each student is personally responsible for showing up to class armed with the textbook, either in printed or digital form."

"The problem is the idea that the price of digital books will be 50 percent of the new price. That's not holding. We're seeing anywhere from 35 to 42 percent off."

Robin is a new faculty at UD, from Penn State.

I believe there are 3 needs in modern literacy that we cannot ignore as educators. Digital literacy is not an "option" anymore. Most of the texts that we read each day appear on a screen, complete with embedded media, advertisements, and hyperlinks. Navigating these spaces is required to function successfully in modern society. We should immerse our students in these mediums, and provide them guidance to maximize their learning. Digital texts foster curation and recall. When I read texts in hard copy, I often annotate using words and images. This helps me to make meaning of the text in the moment that I'm reading it. However, when I read digital texts, my annotations and sketches are automatically added to my intellectual database in Evernote. My database is fully searchable by content and tag. Therefore, when I need citations, information, or ideas to guide my writing, I most often return to the digital sources, ideas, and phrases captured in my database. In short, texts in hard copy make an impact, but digital texts shape my thinking and writing more often. Teachers need to teach students to digital and hard copy texts equally. Existing resources coupled with teacher comfort levels often reduce the amount of instruction that students receive regarding digital texts. In fact, a teacher recently told me that "you just can't get the same experience from a Kindle as you can from a hardback book." Really? We need to get comfortable with digital texts ourselves and share the process meaningfully with students.

Making an e-book can be easy-almost trivially easy-using Pandoc, a tool I've written about earlier on ProfHacker. Of course, Pandoc isn't the only way to do this. Mark has used Sigil and written about it, and another good option is Anthologize, which Julie wrote about.