Group items tagged

"these days when we say "textbook" we seldom mean textbook. We mean course materials. As the Vox article makes clear, the book is not always (not usually?) the hideously expensive part of the deal - the online access codes and other ancillary materials are. Certainly, there are amazingly expensive books out there that get assigned in classes (I hear law books are hundreds of dollars, I know some economics books are, some science books, etc. Even in Literature, a relatively inexpensive field, big anthologies can be pricey). But often - and maybe even usually - when we complain about the cost of books, we're complaining about the cost of supplemental media, password-protected websites, and other items that may include text but are certainly not books. The term "Open Educational Resources" recognizes this. It's a strange habit of language that has kept us from parallelism, though: What OERs oppose is not textbooks, but CERs, Closed Educational Resources."

"An artist and comedian has been told by the publisher Penguin that her new satirical art book breaches its copyright, and if she continues to sell copies it could use the courts to seize the books and have them pulped. Miriam Elia, who has her own comedy series, A Series Of Psychotic Episodes, on BBC Radio 4 and has had a number of short segments on Channel 4, had produced a spoof version of the Ladybird books from the 60s. Generations of British children fondly remember these works, which famously portrayed the daily lives of Mummy, Peter and Jane as an introduction to reading and writing for young children."

"We feel the pernicious practical effects of lengthy copyright terms every day. For example, a study last year of books on Amazon showed that books published after the critical public domain cut-off date of 1923 are available at a dramatically lower rate than books from even an entire century before. The result is a "missing 20th century" in the history of books."

"In combining the classic feeling of handling a book with the interactivity of the computer, Waldek Węgrzyn of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland, has created a new human-computer interface. His "Electrolibrary" project connects the custom made book to a PC. Providing additional information, relevant to the page being viewed, on-screen. Turn a page in the book, and you "turn a page" on the website as well."

"alev Leetaru has been liberating a ton of public domain images from books and putting them all on Flickr. He's been going through Internet Archive scans of old, public domain books, isolating the images, and turning them into individual images. Because, while the books and images are all public domain, very few of the images have been separated from the books and released in a digital format."

"THE BOOKSTORE as we know it is doomed, because many of these establishments are going to go from making a little bit of money every day to losing a little bit. And it's hard to sustain daily losses for long, particularly when you're poorly capitalized, can't use the store as a loss leader and see no hope down the road. The death of the bookstore is being caused by the migration to ebooks (it won't take all books to become 'e', just enough to tip the scale) as well as the superior alternative of purchase and selection of books online. If the function of a bookstore is to stock every book and sell it to you quickly and cheaply, the store has failed."

"An estimated 135 million people play video games, spending three billion hours a week glued to a screen. But that's not necessarily bad news. In fact, playing video games may be part of an evolutionary leap forward, according to Howard Rheingold, educator and author of the book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Rather than characterizing them as hapless drones wasting time, Rheingold's book contends that this massive population of gamers is part of a growing group of "supercollaborators," as described by Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, who's interviewed in the book."

This is true for digital natives...my grandson is always on- line playing games with people he has never seen in person. I am not quite there yet! I still like to make eye contact -:)

"Earlier this year, the Guggenheim Museum put online 65 modern art books, giving you free access to books introducing the work of Alexander Calder, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt & Egon Schiele, and Kandinsky. Now, just a few short months later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched MetPublications, a portal that will "eventually offer access to nearly all books, Bulletins, and Journals" published by the Met since 1870."

"An all-digital public library is opening today, as officials in Bexar County, Texas, celebrate the opening of the BiblioTech library. The facility offers about 10,000 free e-books for the 1.7 million residents of the county, which includes San Antonio. On its website, the Bexar County BiblioTech library explains how its patrons can access free eBooks and audio books. To read an eBook on their own device, users must have the 3M Cloud Library app, which they can link to their library card. The app includes a countdown of days a reader has to finish a book - starting with 14 days, according to My San Antonio."

"We need a book about the failures of media, the collapses of media, the supercessions of media, the strangulations of media, a book detailing all the freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know enough now not to repeat, a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn't make it, martyred media, dead media. THE HANDBOOK OF DEAD MEDIA. A naturalist's field guide for the communications paleontologist. "

Presented by senators Walker Byrd and Justin Mathews, the proposal would provide students with free or inexpensive "open textbooks" through a nonprofit organization, OpenStax, based out of Rice University. "We as students should have purchasing power of the books we buy, but we don't," Byrd said. "The professors require a book and often times you have no control over how much that book is going to be."

"This book is a practical guide to adapting or creating open textbooks using the PressBooks platform. It is continually evolving as new information, practices and processes are developed. The primary audience for this book are faculty and post-secondary instructors in Saskatchewan, Canada who are developing, adapting or adopting open textbooks at the University of Saskatchewan. However, there may be content within this book that is useful to others working on similar Open Educational Resource initiatives."

In 2010, Roberts was a graduate student working for the federal government while teaching introductory psychology at night. He didn't set aside a summer, a month or a few weeks to prepare his book - he created it on a week-by-week basis, often putting sections together late at night or early in the morning. Roberts, who provides his book free of charge to the university's PSYC 100: Introduction to Psychology classes, is part of a national growing open educational resources movement. These resources are published under a Creative Commons license, which allows for free use and sometimes editing, much like Wikipedia. Roberts' psychology textbook draws from free online information, videos and graphics.

We scour the Internet for the best quality textbooks issued under open licenses that allow for printing. Instead of finding a list of 500+ books, you'll find a short list of books we feel are really adoptable and ready to use in a college classroom.

"OpenStax College, the year-old Rice University startup that produces free online textbooks, will more than double the number of fields in which it has titles by 2015, the university announced today. A grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation will allow OpenStax College to add to its current offerings in physics and sociology, and its two new biology books and an introductory anatomy text coming out this fall. The new titles will be in precalculus, chemistry, economics, U.S. history, psychology and statistics, Rice said, toward its goal of producing high-quality open-source books in the 25 most-enrolled college courses. OpenStax says its existing two texts have been downloaded more than 70,000 times so far."

"It is a conversation occurring on campuses across the country: If more and more students are buying and renting their course books online, why do they need a bookstore?"

"The following graph for average textbook prices is based on data obtained in the annual financial survey of college stores. The most recent data for "average price" was based on the sale of 5.5 million new books and 3.0 million used books sold in 142 U.S. college stores, obtained in the Independent College Stores Financial Survey 2014-15. "

"works that benefit from being searchable and portable, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, to be more quickly embraced than the typical monograph. "Reference works will be the vanguard." He also points to disciplines where research moves fast and works are prone to quick obsolescence as being natural adopters of e-books - information technology, business and engineering, for example."

"Problem: You need to provide textbooks for 1500 students in CITY NOT FOUND schools. But because the textbook you currently use costs $80, once you buy a textbook you hold on to it for 7 years before replacing it. This translates into both (1) out-of-date textbooks and (2) textbooks that students are not allowed to actively study with - they can't write, highlight, or take notes in their books because another 6 years worth of students after them have to use the books, too."

"Project Management for Instructional Designers (PM4ID) is - as the name suggests - a book about project management tailored specifically for instructional designers. This book is a revise / remix of a pre-existing, openly licensed project management textbook which was donated to the commons by a benefactor that desires to be attributed as Anonymous."