Comparison of eBook Readers

At JCCC we're scheduling a special Technology Brown Bag session on eBook Readers next week. Northwest Missouri State University (NWMS) has investigated the possibility of transitioning from textbook rentals to using eBooks to deliver all college textbooks. NWMS has researched the current crop of eBooks including the enTourage Edge, iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader and others. In this session Darla Runyon, Curriculum Designer and Assistant Director Center for Information Technology in Education (CITE) and Roger Von Holzen, Director of CITE from NWMS will share their research and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the various eBook readers they've tested.

Resources that you might find helpful on the topic include a short article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/article/6-Lessons-One-Campus-Learne/44440/) and a second article (with much more detail) from the EDUCAUSE Quarterly (http://bit.ly/ICl7L).

Innovation Corner: More on Digital Textbooks, Connexions & DynamicBooks

Follow-up
As a follow-up to the eBook and digital textbook postings earlier (see http://bit.ly/aEdPwt), I heard from at least one assistant professor who wrote: “Thank you for reporting on ebooks. I was just telling [a book] rep today that unless they can lower their price and or provide a better digital learning option, I will be changing books and I already use Flat World Knowledge in one class with great success and will probably replace the [rep’s]book with Flat World. I love Flat World Knowledge and so do my students….”

Tracy Newman, JCCC Ed Tech Center Sr. Analyst also responded to the eBook report stating “Flat World Knowledge (where you can remix textbooks)… reminds me of a project I worked on for KU Med before I started working at JCCC. I worked for a professor in the field of photobiology, which is a difficult field to find textbooks for. He started what he called the Digital Photobiology Compendium (DPC). He offered stipends to various professors to write articles about their field of knowledge. We then organized the articles into a grid where professors could easily create an account, log in, and choose/assemble a “textbook” by picking and choosing which modules and in what order they wanted to use them. Students would then log in and have access to the modules their instructors chose – essentially a custom, online textbook!”

“There was a paper written in 2003 about it: http://bit.ly/bPgWC8

“It looks like they have discontinued the part of the project that allowed students and instructors to log in and create/use the custom textbooks, but the articles are still online and freely available.”

Connexions
A similar resource is available and offered for all college and university faculty through Rice University. It’s called Connexions (see http://cnx.org/). Connexions is self-described as “a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute: [including] authors [can] create and collaborate, instructors [can] rapidly build and share custom collections [and] learners [can] find and explore content.”

You can learn more about Connexions by listening to Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk, one of the founding faculty members. In this TED (Technology, Education, Design) Conference presentation, he explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system; see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRymi-lFHpE&feature=related.

Macmillians DynamicBooks
Of course textbook publishers are not standing by idling waiting for open source textbook repositories to grab their business. Macmillian Publishers has announced a system, called DynamicBooks, that “lets any professor make a customized version of one of the company's existing titles. That means that chemistry professors can take one of the company's chemistry textbooks, rewrite some parts, add their own papers or chapters, or embed videos or homework questions they've created. Any passage added or changed is clearly labeled as not part of the original book, so students know what is original and what is customized—a concession that was made to textbook authors.”

DynamicBooks also includes an incentive system where “Professors who customize a textbook have a chance to make some extra money. For each customized copy that a student buys, the professor who contributed the material gets a dollar. That could add up if a professor's retooled book becomes popular and is assigned by professors at other colleges.” For more information check out http://chronicle.com/article/Format-War-Heats-Up-Among/64323/.

Innovation Corner: Will the 20 Pound Textbook Still EXist in 5 Years?

Some interesting developments are occurring in the eBook/publishing arena. The recent O'Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference in New York (February 22-24, 2010) covered many topics including eBooks. As recorded on the Smashwords blog (Smashwords is an eBook publisher and distributor), Raymond Kurzweil, the man behind the new Blio ebook platform, spoke of “how most forward-thinking people consider technology progression as linear (steady predictable progress), when in fact some of the most important technical progressions are exponential (progress accelerates over time, catching everyone by surprise). Ebooks are likely an exponential phenomena. They're not a fad, and they may reshape the book market faster than any of us believe.”

The posting on Smashwords (http://blog.smashwords.com/2010/02/tools-of-change-conference-notes.html) includes some interesting stats (see the section on “Stats, Stats, Stats”) such as “Ebook customers would be willing to pay more for ebooks if they come with social-media-enabled tools that help them discuss and share the books with others.”

The posting continues, “[What are the] most popular devices for reading ebooks: This is interesting. You might guess, as I did, the Amazon Kindle. Wrong. The most popular device for 47% of customers is their computer screen. Kindle comes in at a close and impressive second place at 32%, followed by 11% for the iPhone, 10% for iPod Touch (note this adds up to 22%, pre-iPad), 9% each for the Blackberry and netbooks, and 8% each for the Barnes & Noble nook and the Sony Reader.”

The most interesting section of the post (“The Future of Digital Textbooks”) states “Whenever publishers create content for which there is great demand (such as textbooks), yet they make that content prohibitively expensive and inaccessible (textbooks), it causes customers to seek out alternative content options (piracy, used textbooks, etc.), all of which provide the publisher no economic benefit.”

“Digital textbooks offer potential relief to students and their parents. The challenge for college textbook publishers is to make the transition to lower cost digital products without putting themselves out of business. I think Flat World (see http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/) is well-positioned for the future of textbook publishing….”

If you want to know more about Flat World Knowledge, which offers “remixable textbooks by expert authors” check out the site (above) or the blog posting at http://blog.smashwords.com/2009/08/flat-world-offers-smarter-fairer-model.html.

Another potential eBook/textbook tool is Scribd (http://www.scribd.com/), “a place for writers to sell books they can't afford to publish and for people to discover others with similar reading interests” (see http://bit.ly/c8p5aW) which has a new send-to-mobile-devices feature that enables readers to select books on the Scribd site and send them to the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s The Nook, the iPhone or a mobile device using the Android operating system (such as the Motorola Droid, Samsung Beam, Nexus One, and HTC Hero). Scribd currently hosts over 10 million documents (growing by 10% each month) and unlike Amazon and Barnes & Noble, their emphasis in on the small self-published author. What does that mean? College instructors can author textbooks or chapters or papers and distribute to the student’s existing mobile device via Scribd.

So when textbooks skyrocket in price, faculty members can author or remix digital versions, and ebook readers, mobile devices and the computer screen are common and popular ways to access content…what do you think is the future of the hardcover or softcover textbook?

Free eBook Reader Coming?

Everyone’s releasing eBooks, from Apple’s iPad to Amazon’s Kindle to the Sony eBook Reader to Barnes & Noble’s The Nook. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Ray Kurzweil, creator of Kurzweil Educational Systems (technology pioneer and developer of a range of assistive technology products) announced the February release of Blio, a free eBook reader. According to eSchool News (see http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/01/31/blio-free-ereader-makes-impression/ ), “Perhaps the software’s most impressive feature is that it can support the original layout, font, and graphics of any book in full color, its creators say. It also can support embedded multimedia such as video and audio, and readers have the ability to highlight, annotate, and share information.”

“Blio isn’t yet available, but already it’s backed by Baker & Taylor, one of the world’s largest publishers, as well as Elsevier, Hachette, HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, and Wiley. Blio users will have access to more than 1 million books altogether, its makers say—including a large selection of current bestselling titles.”

If interested in Blio, go to their web site ( http://www.blioreader.com/ ) and signup for an email alert when the app is available. Also check out http://www.blioreader.com/about.html for a feature comparison chart (bottom of the page) with other eBook readers.