Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
If I thought it would help... I would commit to buying a ream of 1000 CDs, cutting then full of PD ebooks and mailing them to 1000 schools. Would cost about $500 I estimate. But, there is no reason to do this. Pretty much any school has access to this. They can skip buying 1 book for their library and spend that $10 downloading PD ebooks.
BOb
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I think youre putting to much faith into free and cheap book sources for ebooks. A lot of project Gutenburg books arent formatted in any readable format (text files are incredibly hard to read) and is fairly hard to navigate.
If a project like that was to get off the ground (and Id be all for it, Ive been very interested in eBook technology since I was in middle school and think once the readers drop in price dramatically or get subsidized it would be an amazing step up) it would need to be both easy to navigate - via a software frontend - and well formatted in two or three different file formats (say, html, lrf and mobi) with extensive proof reading and editing to ensure that they were 100% as good as any print version. It would need to be just as easy as physically checking out a paper book is. Idiot proof. An 8 year old would need to be able to get a book from the library to his reader on his own. So far there really isnt anything that fills that gap.
The problem I see with a product like the Sony Reader in a school right now is even if every student in the school has a reader to carry with them, there is no software (on the device itself or in the Sony Library program) that would lend itself well to checking out books from a single source easily and on multiple platforms (mac and linux support, schools use them.) If I were running a school's library there would be no way I would install Sony's software on the PCs.
Their heart is in the right place, but if they really wanted to support the education sector they should have planned for this years ago.