One of our big gripes against Gemstar has been the troubled company‘s contempt for user-created material, whether in K-12 or elsewhere. Never mind teachers, librarians and others with their own gems to share with students and so on. Mortals are supposed to buy from the standard publishers. New Gemstar software is especially good–or bad, shall we say?–at thwarting do-it-yourself folks.
So we were delighted to read, via CanadaComputes.com, that Palm Digital Media has K-12 discounts on the eBookStudio program for the creation of your own content. Versions are available for the Palm OS, PC, Mac, standard Windows, and the Tablet PC. If you’re going in the direction of a proprietary format, at least choose one that won’t limit you to overpriced books from the usual suspects.
Along the way, in her useful roundup on e-books and K-12, CanadaComputes.com writer Christine Waleski also passes on various people’s perspectives on the future direction of e-books as replacements for traditonal textbooks and other p-books. She mentions TeleRead, Project Gutenberg and the new International Children’s Library. As we noted to her, the TeleRead model is hardly for the U.S. only. It could be especially useful in other countries such as Canada where vast distances can separate well-stocked physical libraries.
One minor clarification of the story: We were discussing e-ink displays as a technology on the horizon, not a feature of present Tablet PC models. One way or another, however, displays will get much better–making e-books a more intriguing alternative to conventional textbooks. Sorry, CanadaComputes, if we weren’t clearer. Confusingly, Microsoft has used “electronic ‘ink'” in a hand-writing recognition context when describing the current Tablet PC.
