Karen Cator, director of education technologyat the federal Department of Education, said the buses were part of a wider effort to use technology to extend learning beyond classroom walls and the six-hour school day.

The inspiration for this project came from a blog post by Chris Webb of Minot Public Schools in Minot, North Dakota. He wrote about how his colleague, Pat Gerding, used TodaysMeet.com in his middle school social studies classroom.

You can view the article right here (on the web) entire issue here online (it’s pretty slick – a ‘virtual PDF’ that gives you tons of viewing options) or just read our article here (4.4 mb .PDF).

"If you're going to do something like this, you have to be as good as the book in a lot of respects," says Bezos. "But we also have to look for things that ordinary books can't do."

First, it must project an aura of bookishness;

E-book devices like the Kindle allow you to change the font size: aging baby boomers will appreciate that every book can instantly be a large-type edition. The handheld device can also hold several shelves' worth of books: 200 of them onboard, hundreds more on a memory card and a limitless amount in virtual library stacks maintained by Amazon. Also, the Kindle allows you to search within the book for a phrase or name.

Bounding to a whiteboard in the conference room, he ticks off a number of attributes that a book-reading device

First, it must project an aura of bookishness

But then comes the features that your mom's copy of "Gone With the Wind" can't match. E-book devices like the Kindle allow you to change the font size: aging baby boomers will appreciate that every book can instantly be a large-type edition. The handheld device can also hold several shelves' worth of books: 200 of them onboard, hundreds more on a memory card and a limitless amount in virtual library stacks maintained by Amazon. Also, the Kindle allows you to search within the book for a phrase or name.