Kids will lead the coming surge in ereader adoption, suggests the Boston Globe in an article this weekend: "This is a generation of kids that have learned to communicate, search and purchase on very small devices, like mobile phones," said James McQuivey, Forrester Research media analyst. "This year is a guinea pig year, next year the move will be en masse." In addition to being seen as non-threatening by kids, ereader prices are dropping while their capabilities continue to increase, and publishers are aggressively expanding their children's and YA ebook catalogs. Read the full article at Boston.com. ...

  1. California: "Digital Books Engage Students During Test Drive" (by Jill Tucker, San Francisco Chronicle) The drudgery of solving for X flew out the door of a Presidio Middle School classroom Friday as the giddy students traded in their back-breaking algebra textbooks for an iPad touch screen filled with integers and equations that came to life with the flick of a finger. The San Francisco eighth-graders are among 400 California middle school students participating in a pilot study funded by textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on the use of digital textbooks. The results will help...

A detachable keyboard for a small portable---the idea is hardly new. Elonex has one already with a spalshpoof keyboard you can separate. That’s also a form factor I envisioned for TeleReaders back in 1992, and surely others had gone before me. You could always arrange for hinges or a stand to prop up the screen. The results might even be nicer for extended typing than a laptop since you could separately vary your distances from the screen and keyboard. So what do you think of Freescale Semiconductor’s smartbook reference design, ready for CES. If reality, the design...

School-supplied video. A prep school in Massachusetts created an uproar by saying e-books would replace paper books in its library. Now a private high school in Toronto says it is tossing out p-textbooks in favor of Sony e-book readers. The school has deployed at least 110 readers already and is ordering hundreds more. “Our student survey shows that they are twice as likely to read a book available in an e-book format as in hard copy form," says Sam Blyth, chair at Blyth Academy. Catnip for students...

Walk into my school library early in the morning. Look all around at the new large print books and audio books, shelved so neatly. Then marvel at just how quiet it actually is. No, people aren’t caught up in some romance novel, a thrilling mystery, a somber story, a dark satire, or a new novella. Rather, just one library user is in this vast empty space. What can we do to encourage more people to enjoy books? Here are two ideas---one pertaining to young people in general, and one for students with vision...

TeleRead welcomes stories of other professionals using e-reading devices in special ways. E-mail Co-Editor Paul Biba. – D.R. My Sony Reader is a teacher’s pet. Mine. I’m the teacher, and it’s a valuable classroom tool. How? Well, I don’t just use my Reader for “reading” in the traditional sense. It’s also as a way to take long or important files with me for reading on the go. My instruction manuals, recipes message board threads, magazine articles and anything text-based---I can easily save them all in HTML. Then I can import the files into Calibre and tag them to group into collections, which I...

All educational publishers know the holy trinity of textbook publishing: California, Florida and Texas. And winning or losing one out of three of these states in an adoption can tip the economic balance of any program. If California goes free, the economics for education publishing companies will radically shift. Also, it is then likely that Florida and Texas and many other states will follow California's lead in sourcing free educational content. Most immediately, California's migration toward the provision of free textbooks has been driven by the state's precarious financial situation. An effective moratorium on new textbook purchases...

Will children fare better as readers if they can pick their own books?  Yes, say Nancie Atwell and some other reading gurus. The New York Times has the details. The key, as I see it as an ex-child, is balance---between the compulsory assignments and the joy-of-it books that can build the reading habit. A little Jules Verne to go along with Jane Austen, please. I know: Austen books may be more “literary.” But Verne himself excels as a story-teller. Good teachers can introduce students to both kinds of writing and try to point out the difference. Some sprawling major literary classics---masterpieces by...

“At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers’ science lectures,” says Tamar Lewis’s story in the New York Times. But guess what they’re not using, or at least not as often? Traditional textbooks. The Democratic Leadership Council’s problematic Kindle proposal talks about electronic textbooks, but there’s a little problem. More and more educators and students are put off by the very term “textbook.” What’s more, many would prefer to decouple education from reliance on specific companies and specific...

6 Lessons One Campus Learned about E-Textbooks is the headline over Jeffrey R. Young’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. But perhaps it should read instead, “E-textbooks not ready for college students yet, at least in many cases.” Northwestern Missouri State University used the Sony Reader in a pilot study and, according to Young, found that students demanded printed books instead because of navigation problems with E. Mind you, this wasn’t with the new PRS-700, which lets you use a stylus to move around. So maybe the results would have been different. Kindle DX:...

Peter Wayner---author of a smart survey of the e-book scene, mentioning our Paul Biba---is out with another good read. A Book Author Wonders How to Reduce Piracy is the new headline in the New York Times. Pete is vexed that students are pirating his tech-related books---for example, Disappearing Cryptography---and I sympathize. Here’s my advice: Go after the schools, from K-12 through the post-graduate level, but use the carrot, not the stick. I agree with Pete that justifications for piracy are off-target. Screen tech keeps improving, for example, so pirated e-books will be less and...

The more books in your home, the better your kids will fare in school. That's the line in Freakonomics. And now Virginia Heffernan, the "Medium" columnist for the New York Times, is asking a related question about her son. "Will Ben benefit if I load my Kindle with hundreds of books that he can’t see? Or does he need the spectacle of hard- and softcover dust magnets eliminating floor space in our small apartment to get the full 'Freakonomics' effect? I sadly suspect he needs the shelves and dust. "Anyway, Ben doesn’t distinguish between my Kindle...