Entries tagged with “textbooks” from Tools of Change for Publishing

Mobile as New Medium

Andrew Savikas
September 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (21) | Listen

While prepping for my talk tomorrow on mobile publishing at the Digital Publishing Group in New York, I was also popping in and out of a related ongoing email conversation about textbooks and iPhones, and couldn't help but weigh in on the question of how to handle some the issues like cross referencing and annotations on the iPhone compared with in a textbook. Several people suggested the comments were worth sharing with a larger audience:

These are relatively minor technical problems that generally already have solutions. The bigger issue I see is that thinking of the problem as "how do we get a textbook onto an iPhone" is framing it wrong. The challenge is "how do we use a medium that already shares 3 of our 5 senses -- eyes, ears, and a mouth -- along with geolocation, color video, and a nearly-always-on Web connection to accomplish the 'job' of educating a student." That's a much more interesting problem to me than "how do we port 2-page book layouts to a small screen."

Mobile is big on the agenda at TOC Frankfurt, TOC New York, and I'm sure will come up during the upcoming TOC online event.

Report: Large-Form Kindle to Target Textbooks and Newspapers

Mac Slocum
May 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

The Wall Street Journal says a large-form Kindle -- rumored to make its debut tomorrow -- will be partially targeted at the textbook market:

Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school's chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said.

There's also considerable discussion about the impact a large-form Kindle could have on newspapers and magazines. Large-form e-readers from Plastic Logic (due in 2010) and iRex (currently avaialble) are aimed at the same business/media-consumer market.

We'll know full details after tomorrow's Amazon press conference.

Digital Textbooks are for Professors, Not Students

Mac Slocum
September 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Alex Reid says digital textbook publishers are targeting the wrong customer: it's not about students -- they don't like textbooks in any format -- it's about professors. From Digital Digs:

The person you need to sell is the professor. S/he's the one who orders the book. Then it's up to the professor to explain to the students why they need to use the text. If professors say they're not using a digital textbook b/c students say they don't like them, ask them why they use any text at all. I defy anyone to find a single textbook that a student body would say they would choose to read.

(Via the Reading 2.0 list)

Related Stories:

• Seattle P-I: "New version of Kindle in development & more"
• Survey Results: Students Rely on Digital Tools for Research
• Open Source Textbook Adoption Grows

Open Source Textbook Adoption Grows

Peter Brantley
April 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Inside Higher Ed notes the slowly growing open source textbook movement:

Colleges and individual faculty members continue to experiment with putting course information and material online, and "open textbooks" typically are licensed to allow users to download, share and alter the content as they see fit, so long as their purposes aren't commercial and they credit the author for the original material. This allows instructors to customize e-textbooks and offer them to students for free online or as low-cost printed versions.

Related Stories:

• A Q&A on O'Reilly’s "Up-to-Date" Publishing Experiment
• New York Times: "Publishers Sue Georgia State on Digital Reading Matter"