11:36 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Spark (CBC Radio) is a blog, radio show, podcast and an ongoing conversation about technology and culture. Spark is an online collaboration. I've been listening to Spark for a while now. It's usually rather interesting. This interview can played live or downloaded as a MP3.

http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2010/01/full...=Google+Reader

10:59 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

I can't find the original press release, but the English language edition of the JoongAng Daily reported:

Elementary, middle and high school students will be learning with electronic textbooks in addition to currently used paper textbooks starting next year, the Education Ministry said yesterday.

The announcement came as the ministry continues to promote the idea of giving more freedom to textbook publishers to set prices and for schools to decide what textbooks and learning material formats for use in the classroom. Price setting will be made flexible from 2012, according to the ministry.

The ministry’s decision will pave the way for ordinary books on the market and some books written by schoolteachers to be officially adopted as textbooks only if the ministry or local education offices approve. Since that means some textbooks could be even thicker and heavier than conventional textbooks that are normally no thinner than 300 pages, the Education Ministry began thinking about using e-textbooks on CD-ROMs.

from:
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/artic...sp?aid=2915238

10:50 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters co-author Ben H. Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina—an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel.

As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: The tragic adulterous love affair of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya. These characters live in a steampunk-inspired world of robotic butlers, clumsy automatons, and rudimentary mechanical devices. But when these copper-plated machines begin to revolt against their human masters, our characters must fight back using state-of-the-art 19th-century technology—and a sleek new model of ultra-human cyborgs like nothing the world has ever seen.

from:
http://www.quirkclassics.com/index.p...uirk-classic-4

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Folks, I give you the next fad in publishing: classic-scifi mash ups. I guess this means the previous fad (vampire romance) is dead, thank goodness. So what do you think will be used in the next mash up?

11:32 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

I decided to post this story separate from the one on Pocketbook. I think it's worth it.

Pocketbook had a prototype 9.7" ebook reader with the new flexible screen in its booth at CES. You might not be able to see it in the photos, but when I held it in my hands I could see the screen wasn't flat. There was a slight bulge behind the screen from one of the circuit boards.

I asked, and I was told that there will be 2 models. The basic model (PB901) is projected to cost around $450 and be available in September. The PB902 will have Wifi and a touchscreen, and will be available later.

BTW, this isn't the first mention of the Pocketbook 901. There was a couple pictures posted in MobileRead's Deutsches Forum. But I do believe these are the first shots in the wild.

10:01 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Four lawsuits were settled in the past few days. Three involved the US Justice Dept and universities which had started Kindle DX pilot programs; one lawsuit was brought by the National Federation for the Blind against Arizona State University.

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department today announced separate agreements under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) with Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Pace University in New York City and Reed College in Portland, Ore., regarding the use in a classroom setting of the electronic book reader, the Kindle DX, a hand-held technological device that simulates the experience of reading a book.

from:
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/J...0-crt-030.html

Phoenix, Arizona (January 11, 2010): The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the American Council of the Blind (ACB), and Arizona State University (ASU), today announced a settlement agreement resolving litigation filed by NFB and ACB against the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) and ASU. The lawsuit arose from the university's participation in a pilot program using the Kindle DX, a dedicated device for reading electronic books, or e-books, developed by Amazon.com, Inc. The NFB and ACB alleged that the Kindle DX was inaccessible to blind students and thus violated federal law. ABOR and ASU denied and continue to deny any violations of the law.

from:
http://www.nfb.org/nfb/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=527

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Before you say of course this was the right decision, allow me to demonstrate the absurdity of the lawsuits. The basis for the suits was that the Kindle DX was not accessible to the blind. Well, neither are the paper textbooks that the Kindle DX was replacing. Obviously we should stop using them as well.

I could list a bunch of examples, but I won't. The point I'm trying to make is that schools currently use lots of technology that is inaccessible to the blind. They are required by federal law to meet the needs of the disabled, which is accomplished to varying degrees. There is no reason that the accommodations provided for paper textbooks could not be duplicated for digital textbooks.

FYI: The Americans with Disabilities Act is a US law that requires equal access be given to the disabled.

09:33 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

from the announcement:

An additional 100,000 pages of digitised newspaper content have now been added to the 19th-Century British Library Newspapers interface.

This is the first part of the second phase of JISC funding to add 1 million pages of new content to this unique resource in early 2010, published by Gale, part of Cengage Learning.

from:
http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/...ry-newspapers/

This is a continuation of a national digitisation project that was begun in 2006. The recent scans were added to a collection that already consisted of over 2 million pages.

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Even though access is limited to British institutions (universities, colleges, schools, corporations) and I can't use it, I think this is rather neat.

09:18 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

His review is worth reading. I don't agree with all his points, but the issues he raises are valid ones.

http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20100113...y/?mod=ATD_rss

05:41 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

The fourth annual O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference is going to kick off in just over a month. It promises to be a fascinating 3 days in New York City. Topics include:

• Ebook Contracts: Critical Terms and Lessons Learned from Both Sides of the Table
• Reinvent as an Economic Necessity
• Copyright-In-Motion
• Running Two Companies: Taking Book Publishing Beyond Publishing Books
• A Different Model: Building a Digital Publishing House
• Rethinking Copyright for the Digital World
• The Next Generation of Ebooks: Invent It or Witness It!
• How Academics and Students Use Ebooks: Evidence from the JISC National Ebooks
• The Future of Digital Textbooks
• Going Beyond Ebooks: One Publisher's Journey from a Book to Training, Print to Digital

It does look interesting, doesn't it? Unfortunately, MobileRead won't be covering the conference. We can't afford the $1600 fee.