Group items tagged

"Without Apple's orchestration of this conspiracy, it would not have succeeded as it did in the Spring of 2010," Cote wrote. "Apple and the Publisher Defendants shared one overarching interest-that there be no price competition at the retail level. Apple did not want to compete with Amazon (or any other ebook retailer) on price; and the Publisher Defendants wanted to end Amazon's $9.99 pricing and increase significantly the prevailing price point for ebooks. With a full appreciation of each other's interests, Apple and the Publisher Defendants agreed to work together to eliminate retail price competition in the ebook market and raise the price of ebooks above $9.99."

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.

"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."

Tweetbook.in lets you take a backup of your tweets in the form of a diary like PDF ebook. Login to start creating your tweetbooks.

"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."

"Some, including Groom, have gone on record as very unhappy with my appropriation of the term "edupunk" for the ebook, which surprised me because they didn't object to the Fast Company article or to the book. Maybe that's the difference between a title and a subtitle, or maybe it's because Gates is too closely aligned in people's minds with Microsoft and all that is creepy and corporate on the Internet. They're entitled to their opinion."

"unglue (v. t.) 6. To reward authors and publishers for sharing books with the world."

"The Live Lingua Project is part of our commitment to helping as many people as possible learn a foreign language, even if they can't afford our paid Skype language lessons. Part of the earnings of Live Lingua go to hosting, maintaining and constantly updating this area. This project is the internet's largest collection of free public domain language learning materials. It hosts thousands of free ebooks, audios and videos for over 130 languages from around the world. One of our missions is to make language learning accessible to everybody. Enjoy."

"Get the free ebook The Theory and Practice of Online Teaching and Learning: A Guide for Academic Professionals, brought to you by Routledge Education and featuring hand-picked content from some of our leading titles."

"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."

"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."

Although institutional leaders are still discussing e-content plans, in reality the debate is over: students are asking for digital now, this semester.

"As online content continues to be increasingly consumed through mobile platforms, it's no wonder we're seeing new formats to deliver information more quickly and fluidly. In the past, we've seen Wibbitz present any news story as a visual and dynamic infographic instead of plain old text. But now Spritz believes that humans can read much faster using its system of 'streaming' text at up to 600 words per minute."

Chadron Public Schools have yet to see the cost savings in textbook purchases that was expected from providing iPad tablet computers to all of its high school students. In discussion of the district's financial position at Monday's school board meeting, Chadron High School principal Jerry Mack told board members that costs for textbooks haven't gone down, even though the books themselves may not be used by students, because of publishers' pricing strategies. "Publishers demand that you purchase the hard copy before you get the digital version," said Mack. "For some texts, in order to get the digital copy, they require you to get the key first," added technology director Uati Paopao.

What happens to the printed book in the 1-to-1 classroom? Klein: I think the printed textbook should be given a respectful and decent burial. I think it should be gone... There is no reason you can't give kids a digitized version of the textbook. I actually think the textbook itself is going to become anachronistic. The teaching experience that has curriculum and textbook elements integrated is the way of the future.

They zeroed in on the company's Nook e-reader as a sign of failure, demanding payout for "long-suffering" shareholders. Barnes & Noble reported a loss of $87 million in the last quarter, and it attributed about $54.6 million of that to its Nook unit.

Use the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book.

"Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Essays on meaning and learning networks May 19, 2012. Connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. The bulk of this work is devoted to tracing the implications of this thesis in learning. Yes, this could have been a shorter book - and perhaps one day I'll author a volume without the redundancies, false starts, detours and asides, and other miscellany. Such a volume would be sterile, however, and it feels more true to the actual enquiry to stay true to the original blog posts, essays and presentations that constitute this work."