I’m excited to be teaching a set of two 90-minute workshops for ALA TechSource in December about eBooks.  The title is E-Books and Access: Upholding Library Values, held the 7th and 14th of December. So what am I going to talk about? Review of the various for-profit, non-profit, and free sources for e-books Critical licensing terms to consider when acquiring e-books The evolving notion of the e-book How library e-book services can be guided by library values If you have things you want to make sure I cover, comment below or drop me an email or DM or Skype or chat or whatever The world of...

So, until this weekend, my tally of relatives converted over to e-reading was as follows: Dad, gifted a Kobo and happily downloading his obscure boyhood favourites off Manybooks.net; Mom with a Kobo still registered to my account, and to which I do all the book loading; Stepmom, also with a gifted Kobo, happily downloading public library books; and an aunt who had bought my old Kindle off of me when I upgraded during one of her visits. So far, so good, right?Well, it turns out that last one hasn't quite gone as planned. The aunt was in town for a...

I posted earlier about some problems I have been having recently with error-filled ebooks---I am not talking about major editing-process errors, rather, I am talking about typos and formatting glitches resulting from unproofed conversions. People used to complain about these at times before ebooks 'hit it big,' but now that we e-reading customers are a more mainstream group, the complaints are getting increasingly vociferous and this has been the first year where I have really noticed a widespread problem myself. But just how widespread is this problem? Is my feeling that these days, I am becoming more of a copy-editor...

I know that some people feel very defensive on the issue of DRM. They believe that having it is necessary and that anyone who says they are against it, or says they want to remove it, is a dirty, filthy pirate who is out to destroy us all. But as a customer who actually does pay money for media I consume, I do feel that removing the DRM for my personal use is a perfectly justified fair use, and the events of this weekend just prove why: my Amazon account was hacked! I received an email on Saturday that Amazon had...

I'm deep into a drama unit with my grade 1 and grade 2 classes, and my iPad has been indispensable. When I read fiction that is non-work related, I prefer a more straightforward reading experience. But with teaching, the more interactive iPad has been so helpful to me. I can customize my teaching materials, display them and annotate them in ways that help my students learn better and help me manage all the administrative details involved in helping them do so. How am I using ebooks to teach these units to my ...

I love my single-purpose Kindle for distraction-free novel reading, but for educational uses, a multi-function device can be a real time and space-saver. Take as a case study the afternoon I had with my iPad today! LUNCHTIME: NEWS, BOOKS AND MORE I had a lunchroom duty for the first half of lunch, so I didn't have much time to get any work done. Following a quick bite with a co-worker, I had ten minutes between classes to squeeze in a to-do item. I spent it using the Gwizz app to check my Google news feeds, then popping into the Kobo app for...

Stuck at home for a snow day, I've been snuggling up with my ebook reader, and have to my dismay found the experience less than satisfying. I guess my relatively problem-free ebook purchases until now have either been sheer luck, or else I was so blinded by the import of the geographical restrictions bugbear that I didn't even notice the odd quality glitch---until today. I opened four purchased books up on my ebook reader, and all four of them were riddled with mistakes. Book 1 is a current best-seller, purchased from Kobo. Its problem seemed to be a line spacing issue....

It seems that, among those who are doing the visionary thing on the 'future' of ebooks, two possible models are emerging. In the first model, we continue much the same as we are now: customers purchase an ebook at or near full retail price (the oft-quoted 'paper and ink only cost about 5% of the book's real cost' figure comes up a lot in this dialogue) and upon purchase, customers download an ebook file which they load onto their device. Many see the permissions for this file transaction in the future---in a perfect world, they'll do away with DRM like...

I have a major announcement! I've been working away this weekend on a little webpage I'm calling The Indie eBook Hall of Fame. This site is designed to be a one-stop filter for readers to help them find the best of the best indie ebooks being reviewed out there in Blogland. To land on the list, the book must be available in ebook form in multiple formats, and must have been reviewed (and recommended!) by at least three independent bloggers---not just Amazon, Smashwords or Goodreads reviews, but full-on write-ups by bloggers who are reviewing...

I have long maintained that 'cannibalized' sales---the idea that if an ebook was not available, the customer would have bought a book in paper instead---is less an issue than publishers think. I have never bought a hardback novel in my life, even pre-ebook. That sort of publication has always been out of my price range, and if you don't make the ebook available for me to buy, I'll simply buy nothing. But what about books which are NOT hardcover fiction? Are cannibalized sales an issue there? I present, for a case study, a book I purchased yesterday. It's a financial book...

I've been following the magazine 'app' discussion with interest, but not a whole lot of surprise. I have bought exactly one book 'app' in my life, and following the recent iPad release of said app, will never do so again. There are two reasons. Firstly, I don't need all these apps cluttering up my iPad screen when I could buy a hundred plain old non-enhanced ebooks and access them all through one little iBooks icon. And secondly, because I strongly resent the expectation some publishers seem to have that I would be willing to pay more than one time for...

Happy new year, everyone! Now that the ball has dropped, I am officially declaring my 2010 reading year over! The final tally is 102 books read, in the following categories: - 17 alternative or indie books - 74 commercial or mainstream books - 10 library books - 1 freebie from 'other' sources Three books got my lowest rating, two of which were Star Trek novels; I don't tend to finish most truly awful books anymore so most of the books got higher ratings. So, what were my top books of the year? The following books, in no particular order, were new to me in 2010 (aka...