While the rumors of Apples new tablet computer dubbed "iPad" by pundits, are reaching fever pitch, the O´Reilly Radars Mark Sigal has an interesting take on where Apple is intending to take eBooks and why they will succeed. He describes books as information transmitters and as such eBooks are perfect tools for innovators such as Apple. It is all about interactivity, the books should be able to do more and you to do more with them. He imagines travel books with up to date information, phone numbers, prices of local hotels and restaurants, videos and slide shows. Comic books with multiple endings, chosen by the reader like the old dice paper and pen roll playing books. i can throw in some ideas myself, such as self-correcting math books, geometry in 3D, wikipedia links to authors and so on. Although he attaches these new innovations to the predicted success of an Apple tablet, this is surely the future of eBooks in some kind of shape or form.
The colour revolution is at our doorsteps, with every player announcing a colour ereader on their road-map and Qualcomm it not any different, or is it? They have announced a very exciting new colour screen technology which shares the low power requirement of the e-ink screens because it uses no power when the screen is static and can be easily read in direct sunlight. It can also show videos and only uses a fraction of the power of today's LCDs doing so. They are hoping to bring the screens out next year and the good news for producers and consumers alike that it states that production costs are not much higher then your average LCD screen.They also point out when used on a laptop, these screens should improve overall battery life by 30 to 40%. Let the games begin.
Under new legislation, the state of Texas has allowed the different school districts to spend a portion of the state funds, allocated for printed texbook, on digital content and hardware such as computers and ebook readers. This signals a shift in more ways the one. It transferred power from the state to the individual school districts, which means more localized control over study materials and it frees the Texas educational system from the stronghold of the biggest textbook publishers who normally have been the sole providers for the Texas educational system. Now each school district can decide from a wide array of providers and solutions. In the past, Texas has been one of the most lucrative business for the three main textbook publishers in the world, namely Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, and McGraw Hill, as the state has centralized purchasing and pays publishers directly. The proponents of the old rigid purchasing system such as the State Board of Education have expressed concerns over quality issues with material purchased, and finds some of the open source material not up to snuff. Although the pros of going digital are summed up rather nicely by New Braunfels school superintendent Mike Smith who said
“I keep hearing that the kids don’t want to do this. It’s the adults that don’t want to do this: the naysayers, the boo-birds; teachers, parents, taxpayers, administrators, board members,” he said. “The students are the natives in the digital environment. We are the immigrants. I’ve got a kid at home who can stick his hand in his pants pocket and send a text message without looking — and we’re teaching him with a hard copy book.”
Texas is obviously taking great strides towards the future with this step and getting rid of the oligarchy of the publishers. By freeing up purchasing, making it more democratic, by transferring power from from the State Board of Education to the Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency and to the school districts, both students and teachers will be better prepared for the future.
According to fiercewireless.com, Amazon has decided that it was to much trouble making two different versions of the Kindle (one for the US that uses Sprint's CDMA technology and another for the international market which uses the more widespread GSM technology) and is changing its service provider in the United States. This means that instead of using Sprint, Amazon will switch over to AT&T which uses GSM. But it will still support any CDMA devices sold including the Kindle DX which is only available in the US and will still be sold CDMA only. This means that owners of the new GSM powered kindles will be able to roam outside of the US with their devices.
Oled-display.net can report that LG is soon releasing a solar-powered eReader with a 6” OLED display and that 4 - 5 hours of charging in the sun is suppose to be enough for an extra day. It will be one of the first readers using OLED technology instead of the e-ink screens used by the likes of Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle. It is worth mentioning that using OLED technology for ebooks readers has the disadvantage that white pixels require power while black pixels do not, so black text on white paper would use more power than doing the same on a e-ink screen.
TeleRead highlights ebook related findings found by a very interesting survey done at the Frankfurt Book Fair. 50% of industry experts see 2018 as the year when digital content will generate more income than traditional content. 41% think that sales will reach 10% in 2011. On ebook pricing the people asked thought that ebooks should be
more expensive than the printed book: 4%
as expensive as the printed book: 15%
10 per cent cheaper than the printed book: 11%
20 per cent cheaper: 17%
30 per cent cheaper: 14%
more than 30 per cent cheaper: 16%
a standard price as with Amazon ($9.99): 15%
other price model: 6%
This is very interesting as opinion seems to be very divided on pricing but half of the industry experts seem to agree that digital content will be outselling paper within 10 years.
Nick Cave has put his unique stamp on the ebook debate by releasing a iPhone version of his new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. But in typical Nick Cave fashion there is more to it then that. For within the book you can find accompanied readings and music specially recorded by the author himself. Mr. Cave told the Guardian that
"Being a musician as well, I've been able to provide all sorts of other things to make it as interesting an experience as possible to read this book on the iPhone … The strangest thing for me is that almost all musicians feel that we are chasing the tail of something beyond our grasp with music downloading and so on but, quite by accident, with the publishing of this book I'm suddenly involved with something that is taking the bull by the horns and that's quite exciting."
This is just an example how exciting ebooks can be, and this is just the tip of iceberg, soon we will be seeing ebooks with embedded video, hyperlinked to google maps and wikipedia etc. possibilities are endless. Hopefully this will show us where the wild roses grow.
Should we get used to free ebooks? According to Cory Doctorow, we should. In an article for the guardian.co.uk he argues that for published writers, giving away free ebooks can enhance sales and awareness of your books and therefore is a great boon for writers and publishers alike. He argues that the problem for most authors is not that people steal their books but obscurity. That not enough people have even heard of you to even contemplate purchasing or stealing your book. Although he makes a valid point and this is a tactic, many in the music industry use to get a bigger fanbase, Corey makes the mistake of thinking people will always prefer to buy printed books over ebooks. So not only do you risk people getting used to ebooks for free you will have possibly damaged your sales. Now it will always be a tactic of the unestablished artists to share their work for free but to give everything you have ever written for free is going a little bit to far.
The top executives for the American newspaper industry met to discuss the future of the newspaper and the transition into a digital medium. All the big US newspapers, from New York Times and Hearst Newspapers to the CEO of Associated Press, were represented at the meeting, which comes amidst a troubled time in the newspaper industry. Bankruptcy is rife nationwide with even the biggest newspapers struggling to keep afloat.
The media mogul Rupert Murdoch was interviewed on his own news network Fox where he said that the future of newspapers will be on digital devices, but it may be 10 to 15 years before readers go fully electronic.
"Some of the greatest electronics companies in the world are working on this very hard," he said. "I think it's two or three years away before they get introduced in a big way and then it will probably take 10 years or 15 years for the public to swing over."
This is probably playing it a little to safe as we have seen, the rapid adoption of mp3 players and smart phones such as the IPhone, it probably wont be too long before we all get our daily on our tablets and ereaders.
Ficbot over at Teleread has written an excellent article on how he used eBooks to de-clutter his house and conveniently carry both his paperbacks and magazines around with him using the Sony reader. Not a bad way of finding that extra space around the house as well as sorting out the book collection. By throwing out the books that you only read once, and can be purchased as ebooks if need be, you really can de-clutter.
West Virginia, the state John Denver sang so proudly about, is a state with beautiful scenery. It is where you find the grand Appalachian Mountains, but this is also a state in dire straights. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, West Virginia is the third lowest in per capita income ahead of only Arkansas and Mississippi. It also ranks last in median household income and the proportion of West Virginia's adult population with a bachelor's degree is the lowest in the U.S. at 17.3%. So it is with that baggage that the Charleston Daily Mail can report that the state is considering following in California's footsteps and go from printed textbooks to digital textbooks.
The goal of the policy is to make the state more "open and friendly" to digital content creators, said Alma Simpson, coordinator for instructional material with the state Department of Education. The new material could be distributed to students on laptops or handheld electronic devices.
According to the Charleston Daily Mail, West Virginia spends about $150 million on textbooks every six years, so any saving on that number would be beneficial for the cash starved state. Although, West Virginia is one of the few states to turn out a surplus on their state budget so this could be a step in improving welfare in the state.
PixelQi vs. Kindle vs. Laptop (13.07.09)
This video shows a comparison between the Kindle, the modified LCD PixelQI screen and a regular laptop. The difference is quite remarkable with the PixelQi screen here seen integrated into an Acer netbook looking preferable to the Kindle. It combines the multimedia capability's of a regular screen, i.e view videos and colour with the lack of eye strain that comes with reading on a regular computer lcd screen.
The Tokyo International Book Fair began yesterday and will continue until the 12th of July. Teleread picked up an interesting fact about the Japanese book market and especially ebooks. It quotes an article from Publishing Perspective
"In Japan, the market for digital publishing continues to grow at a rate of 200% per year since 2003 and in 2007 is estimated to have hit $335 million in annual sales."
As we know when it comes to technological innovation, Japan tends to be years ahead in both avaiability of new technology and consumer uptake, but a similar trend can be found in the United States digital book market, a trend that is on the rise.
The Codex Sinaiticus, written in Greek in the fourth century, the tile holder of oldest bible in the world will be made accessible only in a £1m scholarship exercise. THe biggest part of the book resides in The Biritish Library but has pages scattered around in Germany, Russia and St Catherine's monastery in Egypt's Sinai desert. Apparantly before this nobody alive had seen all the pages together in one place. The pages of the codex, which have been scattered for over 150 years are now accesible to all here.
Thomas Crampton has come up with a list of the latest and the greatest in newspaper e-reader projects in the far east. On the list there are some exciting new ideas such as the Nuutbook from South-Korea which is produced by a company called Neoluxiim. Apart from having a slightly ambiguous name, they are interesting because they have taken the green route and produced a solar-powered e-reader, which is perfect for low-power hand-held devices. Besides from being handy, it is environmentally friendly. Although the list is not exhaustive, it is an interesting glimpse into e-reader development.
ScrollMotion, a mobile application software company based in New York, announced last month that it has secured deals with content providers to access 170 newspapers and 50 magazines and books from publishers including HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and John Wiley & Sons. This is in addition to the 800 titles already available through its iPhone reader application released late last year. These include best-sellers such as "Angels and Demons," and "Twilight". ScrollMotion plans to offer more than 1 million books and come this fall will have ready subscription based services to newspapers and magazines including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
The company has also express interest for the textbook market and their iPhone application has many of the features that students require such as search, animated graphics, turning pages at the swipe of a finger, the ability to annotate and copy and paste text, and email passages without exiting the program. But small hand-held devices like the iPhone do suffer from one big dissadvantage, that is their small screen size but ScrollMotion CEO John Lema said users are averaging 15 minutes per session with ScrollMotion."That's a very long reading time,""I think it's a comfortable form factor for reading." said Lema.
After much talk and many tests, the publishing world seems to be waiting. Waiting for a dam to burst and then run for their life and they are doing their best to delay that from happening. But it begs the question, is it better to keep adding to the dam against the rising floods or to build a ship that can ride the wave. Although the publishers seem for now, content with holding off to the last minute, the consumers tell a different story, especially in the educational sector. As a tool for teaching, ebooks open up a different world to what the traditional textbooks can offer. The digital ebook is a living thing, can be seamlessly updated, hyper-linked into the internet, embedded with video and audio, we even can offer a system of editing so that a teacher can add a video clip of the lesson of the day before into the book and republish and the new book is then sent to the students.
A New Medium
Even the disabled can benefit from this new technology, voice controlled readers with Braille technology could easily be introduced for the blind, and on all readers and ebook reading programs worth their salt, you can resize the letters for the visually impaired. One could even say that an ebook is not even comparable to a printed textbook, it is a different medium, a different way of looking at education, as something that is always evolving and changing in contrast to the printed truth that is only changed once a year. Universities are starting to embrace this notion at an increasingly fast pace and you would be hard pressed to find a university in the United States that has not at least talked about it. Northwest Missouri State University has been the big innovator so far, with a tried and tested computer rental program along with the University of Texas and the University of San Diego.
Democracy vs. Corporatocracy
But a disconcerting grey cloud is casting a shadow over the process, especially in the United States, where the corporate culture seems to have taken over at the steering wheel, and like Microsoft with the PC's did in the 90s, big corporations seem to be taking a strangle hold on the universities, forcing them into choosing between providers and proprietary systems, such as Northwest Missouri State University has done with McGraw-Hill and we should we wary not to spoil the chance we have to make learning more democratic still. We should try to open education up to a free space of different payment models and providers, open source models and freebooks and not offer up our wrist to the chains of corporate greed.
Citing inside sources the German magazine WirtschaftsWoche reports that Vodafone Germany is preparing to launch an ebook reader of its own this fall in co-operation with some of its partners. The first prototypes are currently being tested and will be able to deliver books, magazines and newspapers wirelessly over their network Kindle-style. The device will not be produced by Vodafone itself, but will be branded with a screen size of 9.7-inch. Vodafone is also thinking of selling its device in combination with newspaper or magazine subscriptions.
Bridgestone is moving forward with its newest foray into the E-book reader market. Bridgestones new type of e-paper uses its proprietary "electron powder and granular material."This new kind of e-paper, will be available in size A4, and can rewrite the screen in 0.8 seconds, which is ten times faster than the company's previous e-paper. So, it realizes a faster screen refresh speed. The company will also offer a colour version of the e-paper.
Come this August, 115 students at Waverly High School in Waverly, Illinois, will get a free Dell netbook with all of their textbooks preloaded on them. This is achieved by getting grants from the U.S. Department of Education’s Rural Education Achievement Program and the nationwide High Schools That Work program. The grants, about $4,000 in existing district revenue and a $10-per-student increase in textbook rental fees helped fund the little over $36,000 spent on the purchase of 150 computers and textbooks. The reasoning used for this project is the same as we have heard before, the savings on digital textbooks vs. printed textbooks, getting the students to interact with computers empowers them to use computers from an early age and makes learning new and exciting, but the school principal Debra Rust also comes at it from a slightly different angle.
“The loads students carry in their backpacks will be much less,” said Rust, comparing carrying a three-pound laptop oppose to a backpack of books weighing 50 pounds.The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that heavy backpacks and book bags account for nearly 5,000 emergency room visits each year.
So not only are digital textbooks good for your wallet but also for your back it seems.
Border has launched a new E-book reader, The Elonex ebook, which it has started selling along side the iRex Iliad ebook reader which they introduced last year. The iRex Iliad has been slow to move mailydue to its 399£ price tag, the Elonex will be priced at a more resonable 189£. It is hoping to take on the popular Sony Reader which usually hovers around the 200£. This new device comes with 100 titles already pre-loaded and can hold up to 1,000 books (on a separate memory card). The device supports common formats such as ePub and Adobe formats and is of course compatible with the e-books being sold on Borders website. Borders is also selling an accessory pack priced £29.99, which includes a 4GB memory card, and a leather case.
Peter Newbould, commercial director at Borders, commented that "Digital bookselling is still in its infancy, but we believe it is here to stay. We were first to market with an e-book reader when we introduced the iRex Iliad last year and by launching the Elonex e-book at a retail price of £189, making it available in all of our UK stores and ensuring it is easy to shop the 45,000 titles at www.borders.co.uk, we hope to bring new customers into the market."
Four South-Korean designers; Seon-Keun Park, Byung-Min Woo, Sun-Hye Woo & Jin-Sun Park, have come up with a clever concept reader which they call "Braille E-Book". If such a reader would be put in production it would be a great benefit for the blind as not many books are published in Braille because of the production cost but such a reader would go a long way in solving that problem.
At the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses held in Philadelphia the focus was very much on digital distribution of journals, articles and books. As more university presses are seeing their funding being cut, the name of the game has become the one of survival.
It was noted on the meeting that the presses where not necessarily feeling the squeeze because of the poor state of the economy but mainly because of a change in behaviour of their readers. So what the presses really need to focus on is to prepare for a shift from the physical printed product to a digital-distribution.
Colleen O'Connor, a San Diego News Network columnist, gives her two cents about California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's plans to throw out the textbooks in the schools and replace them with digital edition in a bid to save the cash starving state some money. She states an interesting case for the use of ebooks in classrooms and points out that when most of the countries universities are already moving towards discarding printed textbooks why not make the same case for primary and high school students and I quote:
"I repeat, if it is good enough for Princeton, why not California’s students? And why should they wait until college? Our high school students are dropping out from boredom; our teachers are buckling under tedious and tiresome curricula, more outdated than the Studebaker, and our state is falling behind in multiple categories. Throw in obsolete texts vs. the allure of twittering, blogging, rapping and Facebook, and you realize the imperative of eBooks in the classroom."
"Add to this the potential to manufacture the products in California, (think jobs and revenue); the surge in student interest (think fewer dropouts); the incredible lightness of carrying a 2 lb. instrument instead of a 20 pound backpack; as well as the environmental savings of paperless texts, and you glimpse the future. As for the cost, a best selling book downloads in less than 60 seconds on a Kindle DX, and sells for $9.99 instead of bookstore costs of $25 or more! Imagine the savings for a math or chemistry textbook. I know the complaints. I understand the reluctance of parents and teachers to try something new. After all, a book is a book. It needs pages, paper, covers, and heft to be understood. But surely, we have moved beyond the school days when a hand bell was rung to get you to class, a book was opened to sleep over, and a candle was used for illumination."
Mary Lou Jepsen, one of the innovators behind the "One Laptop One Child" program is back, this time with a innovative new type of LCD screen. She is the founder of a company called Pixel Qi which is based in California, USA. They have developed a new type of affordable LCD screen called 3Qi. It will operate in three settings: a full-color one with backlight and will work very much as an ordinary LCD screen; a low-power sunlight-readable, reflective e-paper mode; and a low-power, basic color transflective mode. The screens are initially expected to be available in 10.5-inch and 7.5-inch screen sizes.
This screen would provide user with the best of both worlds, by having a normal LCD screen and the ability to toggle the reading mode, which would make it easier to read for extensive periods of time.This technology would be perfect for students when these screen become available in netbooks.
The governor of California announced today a huge step forward in mainstream ebook adoption. In effort to save Californias ailing economy, he plans to do a state wide switch from printed textbooks over to ebooks. Mr Schwarzenegger explained that this move would save the state hundreds of millions of dollars.
The governor said "Textbooks are outdated, in my opinion,"
"For so many years, we've been trying to teach the kids exactly the same way.
"Our kids get their information from the internet, downloaded onto their iPods, and in Twitter feeds to their cell phones... Basically. kids are feeling as comfortable with their electronic devices as I was with my pencils and crayons."
"So why are California's school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?"
State officials say the average textbook now costs $75 to $100, which is a lot dearer then the average digital textbook.
