Jun 22 2009
Weekly Tech Links
Keishon of AvidBookReader explains why the iPhone is her go to ereading device even though she owns and loves her Sony Reader.
Intel hopes to have wireless power charging available in the next 18 months. As someone who lugs around three items that need to be charged at all times, I can only say that 18 months cannot pass quickly enough.
Arnold Schwarznegger’s requirement for California to go digital in its textbooks could represent a huge financial loss for Pearson (parent company of Penguin). Because educational texts represent a major source of income for Pearson, it has responded rapidly to the Governor’s call for digital texts. ”[T]extbook giant Pearson has responded with digital content to supplement California’s programs in biology, chemistry, algebra 2, and geometry.”
Kindle download limitations can be publisher initiated according to the blogger at Gear Diary. Apparently, publishers can license the right to only download a copy to one device but you don’t know until you try it because there are no DRM restriction warnings.
Wall Street Journal suggests that there will be Amazon Kindle price increases in the future because Amazon cannot sustain the loss leader pricing of $9.99 forever. (Only until the publishers cave is my supposition).
Apple has instituted ratings for apps for the iPhone and iTouch. I keep wondering if publishers have given any thought to this or not.
Finally, ScrollMotion has announced a partnership with LibreDigital to provide over 100,000 books to iPhone/iTouch users. You’ll be able to purchase the books via the new “in app” purchasing features which uses your Apple iTunes account. (the one click purchase is licensed through Amazon). It is unknown at this time whether this will be yet another DRM’ed format and what the pricing will be because ScrollMotion’s current pricing is way high. I personally hate the ScrollMotion application because it requires you to suffer through the animated page turn.
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Jun 22, 2009 @ 13:28:12
I jsust wish that the Governator’s call for digitizing textbooks came with any sort of support for school computer technology. The disadvantaged kids will be more so under this system. It’s one more set of hurdles for kids who don’t have decent computer access at home and already have to work harder to succeed than their more affluent counterparts.
Jun 22, 2009 @ 21:06:24
I don’t know about California, but where we live and my children go to high school, several of their programs have gone to digital textbooks. Namely Math, Science and English. Big, big mistake.
While it is true that the text is available online, it is not always available. There are issues with the host company, with weather knocking out internet service, with assignments not being saved before they are closed which results in the assignment having to be redone. The students were all required to purchase data keys so that they could copy the text onto them so if there were internet issues the text was still available, but the school issued datakeys dropped the text, or the datakeys were lost or damaged.
I am all for moving to digital text, but as SonomaLass said, if you don’t have the technology to support the move in your schools (which to me says you issue laptops to all the students) then you are causing more headaches than it is worth.
One other major issue I had with the digital text – Math especially, is that the answers were available on the website. Why bother learning your work, if the answers are there for you to copy?
I guess for me the biggest mistake was going digital with no paper backup. Sometimes you just need a book to read through; being online is distracting when you can open multiple windows and be chatting and emailing and game playing when you are supposed to be doing homework. And yeah – the school is supposed to have firewall and blocks up for those things, but I dare you to show me a teenager who can’t get around a firewall.