Kindles and iPads are making their way into classrooms across the world. Schools like Seton Hill and George Fox are giving iPads to incoming students. Monte Vista Christian School, in California, has sixty of them that are now in the hands of advanced placement students. Gibbon Fairfax Winthrop High School in Minnesota ordered 320 for their students in April of this year. Dr. Joseph Kim of KevinMD.com calls for making iPads mandatory for medical school students. Stanford University seems excited about the idea and gave them out to first year medical students this year. Clearwater High School...

What’s in a name? A lot, really. Take the issue of “piracy”—most commonly used in Internet circles to refer to unauthorized distribution of other peoples’ intellectual property. Its use in that sense actually pre-dates the Internet by a considerable length of time (see video at bottom). For a long time, a debate on whether this is an appropriate use of the term has raged. Representing those who do not think the term is properly used, the Free Software Foundation has this to say: Publishers often refer to copying they don't approve of as...

George Santayana said “Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” Certainly e-book history has been repeating—the iPhone/iPod Touch and the Kindle are standing in for the Palm PDA and the RocketBook as a new generation discovers e-books just as the early adopters did ten years ago (only a bit more successfully this time). But the history that people have been forgetting (or perhaps not knowing to begin with) is that there was a thriving electronic fiction community years before even the earliest commercial e-books were around to be adopted. Over the last four columns, I have...