California Governor Jerry Brown gave his pen a workout this past Thursday,  September 27. In addition to signing legislation prohibiting social network snooping by employers and colleges, he also signed off on a proposal for the state to fund 50 open source digital textbooks. He signed two bills, one to create the textbooks and the other to establish a California Digital Open Source Library to host them, at a meeting with students in Sacramento. (See video below.) Source: Ars Technica     * * * Update: Thanks to commenter Frank Lowney for bringing our attention to the following infographic from Twenty Million Minds; it illustrates the implications...

Back in mid-June, we posted a press release that introduced you to BookBoon.com, a London-based online publisher that offers free open-access textbooks for students. We heard from BookBoon again this morning; apparently the company recently asked roughly 10,000 students about their preferences between digital textbooks and printed textbooks. According to BookBoon, 2,164 respondents were students based in the U.S. Even more interesting: BookBoon transformed the survey's results into a few different blog-friendly infographics; the results of the U.S.-based students responses are illustrated in the graphic below. Directly beneath that is a second infographic that displays the results of the UK-based students who responded...

In classrooms, e-books are sort of top-down, one-way communication tools. You buy the book, you read what it says. But what if the same device you use for e-books could also be used to respond to the professor in your classroom? Ki Mae Heussner has an interesting piece at GigaOm on Top Hat Monocle, a company that pitches “clicker” software, compatible with smartphones, tablets, and laptops, to professors to use in their classes, with students paying $20 per semester for a subscription to use the software. Hardware “clicker” devices to let students provide feedback in class have apparently come...

Some friends called my attention to an interesting-looking book: Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellectual Property Protection by Aaron Schwabach—a legal textbook examining the copyright issues surrounding fanfic. At $81 for the paper form or $70 for a Google e-book, it’s obviously meant for the edification of college or law students, not the enjoyment of one such as you or I. That being said, I found an interesting review of it by Stacey M. Lantagne in the peer-reviewed journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Lantagne’s review gives a pretty good idea of what the book is about, and...

We previously reported that Inkling was launching a free e-book publishing platform in competition to Apple’s more restricted iBook Author, and that it was partnering with Follett in an e-textbook program. Up to this point, the utility of Inkling has been a bit limited in that access to its textbooks was restricted to its iOS app, meaning students had to have iPads to make use of the content and couldn’t use it in anything else. But now TechCrunch reports that Inkling has just unveiled an HTML 5.0 web application that can allow any Inkling e-textbook to be viewed on...

Speaking of the Espresso, a digital publisher’s paen to self-publishing through it led me to a blog post from last year in which librarian Rick Anderson of the University of Utah’s Marriott Library discussed the Espresso’s pros and cons in a bit greater depth than I’ve seen other posts go into. The problems Anderson found mainly have to do with a few technical glitches in the device itself, particularly due to the desert climate of his library being drier than the Espresso was originally designed for. Also, the device has a 45-minute-to-1-hour warmup time due to the glue...

A decision has come down in the Georgia State University e-reserves case, which we’ve covered here, here, and here. The case concerned electronic compilations of course material that professors bundle together from books in situations where they would not be using enough material from a particular book to make it worthwhile for students to buy it. A number of publishers objected to the practice, and filed suit against Georgia State University. (Presumably if the suit was successful, they could then have gone after other universities over the same practices.) The judge has spent a great deal of time working...

Caroline Vanderlip, CEO of SharedBook, has an opinion piece on Inside Higher Ed stating that “going digital” is not a panacea that will automatically bring about lower prices for textbooks. Much as publishers of mass market fiction have been saying, if the costs of producing the material remain the same, the price of the textbook will stay about the same whether the distribution method is digital or electronic. And OER (open educational resources” material will not necessarily change this either, at least for a while—there just isn’t very much of it yet. Vanderlip writes that the best way of...

Might one of the as-yet-untapped benefits of e-books be the ability to revise? After the ending of Mass Effect 3 sent fans into an uproar, BioWare and Electronic Arts have announced that a free downloadable content pack will be released this summer including additional cinematic sequences that will “give fans seeking further clarity to the ending of Mass Effect 3 deeper insights into how their personal journey concludes.” Make no mistake, fans were extremely upset at the ending of the game. Instead of the expected multitude of different endings depending on the choices characters had made, there were...

All may not be coming up roses in e-textbook land. Sarah Kessler reports on Mashable that one of Kno’s largest-selling textbook publishers, Cengage Learning, is attempting to pull its material from Kno’s store—and Kno is suing for breach of license agreement. Though Kno deals with about 40 publishers, Cengage’s content has historically made up 25% of its overall sales. However, Cengage doesn’t like the way Kno allows users to copy and paste passages from textbooks into a separate journal view, considering it an unauthorized derivative work. The publisher gave Kno 30 days to correct the issue, then terminated the...

That's the take from this Toronto Star article: Mixed feelings about the loss of a bookstore at Ryerson University and the sequestering of its books, by the students... though not by the article's author. "Poor books. Snubbed yet again, this time by a university, an institution of learning." The article describes the closure of one campus bookstore, causing confusion by students who walked into the building to find it being repurposed as classroom and office space.  Some of the books were moved to the other campus bookstore; the remainder were put into a storage room, and some will be returned to the...

CNet has an article about Google’s stripped-down Chromebook laptops, and their placement in schools. In a speech at the Florida Educational Technology Converence yesterday, Rajen Sheth, Google’s leader of Chromebook work for business and education, announced that hundreds of schools across 41 states have outfitted at least one classroom with Chromebooks. Three schools in Illinois, Iowa, and South Carolina will be outfitting all their students with the devices—over 27,000 in all. The schools appreciate the advantages the device offers of constant updates, cloud storage, and “invisibility” in terms of booting and use—teachers can focus on instruction rather than technical...