That's the title of an article in Fast Company today.  Here's a snippet: A recent University of Washington study interviewed 39 first-year graduate students in the university's Department of Computer Science & Engineering, which participated in a pilot study of Amazon's Kindle DX (a large-screen e-reader). By seven months into the study, fewer than 40% of the students did their schoolwork on the Kindle. The problem: the Kindle has poor note-taking support, doesn't allow for easy skimming, and makes it difficult for students to look up references (in comparison with computers and textbooks). As a result, some of the students interviewed kept...

From the press release: The University of Michigan Library announced the opening to the public of 2,231 searchable keyed-text editions of books from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). ECCO is an important research database that includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. ECCO contains more than 32 million pages of text and over 205,000 individual volumes, all fully searchable. ECCO is published by Gale, part of Cengage Learning. The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) produced the 2,231 keyed texts in collaboration with Gale, which provided page...

May 16 will be the trial date for this important case on on fair use.  As Publishers Weekly says: While the high-profile, visionary Google settlement has captured the attention of the publishing industry at large, e-reserves is popular, common practice that has long vexed publishers. The practice takes its name from the traditional library “reserve” model, where a professor might make a limited number of physical copies of articles or a book chapter available for students, generally subject to permission, and, in theory, with reproduction fees paid to publishers. In the digital world, however,...

From the Sydney Morning Herald: THE University of NSW [New South Wales] is throwing away thousands of books and scholarly journals as part of a policy that critics say is turning its library into a Starbucks. Academics say complete journal collections, valuable books and newspapers dating to the 19th century are being thrown out to clear space for cafe-style lounges. The Herald has obtained an internal document listing thousands of titles due to be pulled from shelves. The 138-page ”weeding” list includes encyclopaedias, dictionaries, books in foreign languages...

Here are the key findings and recommendations from the report.  You can find the full report here. KEY FINDINGS:Pilot project staff and August Entry students overwhelmingly recommend iPads for use byother TCFS staff and students: 76.2% of staff and 80% of studentsiPads are effective, durable, reliable and achieve their educational aims of going further, fasterand with more funiPads have advantages for TCFS over other technologies such as netbooks and laptopsiPads are not a replacement for desktop/laptop computers or other educational technologiesbut are an enhancementHigh quality audio-visual equipment in the classroom (such as flat screen TV monitors anddocument cameras), along with timely...

From the site: Broadway, the main street that runs through Robert Pinsky’s home town of Long Branch, New Jersey, was once like thousands of other main streets in small towns across the country. But for Pinsky, one of America’s most admired poets and its former Poet Laureate, this Broadway is the point of departure for a lively journey through the small towns of the American imagination. “Pinsky offers a provocative take on the relationship between artists and small-town America. He explicates quotations from Cather, Faulkner and Twain, as well as scenes from filmmakers like Hitchcock and Sturges, and reminiscences about his own...

From Matt Hayler's 4oh4 Words not Found blog. Matt is a PhD student in the UK and a regular contributor to TeleRead. This is an important issue and as we have a lot of UK readers I reprint Matt's blog post in full. Blockquotes omitted. _______________________ On Thursday the 9th of December 2010 the UK government will be voting on whether they ruin higher education in this country. This is a painful simple truth. The swathe of cuts that are proposed to university teaching budgets, to research budgets, and also to the support of 6th forms and further education...

As an Art History major in college I find this very exciting. A handful of textbooks reigns supreme over art-history survey courses. To Beth Harris, who teaches the subject online for the Fashion Institute of Technology, these expensive, static tomes don’t do a great job of engaging students. They lack a sense of what it’s like to see paintings where they hang. And, Ms. Harris argues, they present a consensus view that doesn’t convey the messiness, passion, and disagreement of scholarship. Ms. Harris is trying to change all that. With a colleague, Steven Zucker of the Pratt Institute, she created...

From the press release: XanEdu, the leading faculty-preferred provider of custom course materials and textbooks, has partnered with Barnes & Noble and Texas A&M to conduct research on the efficacy of accessing and studying custom course materials within NookStudy. Students at Texas A&M will access their XanEdu course materials in NookStudy and provide valuable feedback on usability, accessibility and feature preferences of both the application itself, and the digital content provided. NookStudy enables students to manage all of their digital content – eTextbooks, class materials, and notes within one application – and is available for any student to download free...

Got the following email from Frank Lowney that I thought I should pass on to you: I thought that other Teleread subscribers might be interested in Apple’s not yet widely publicized announcement that the iTunes U service (free to higher education) now supports .epub files which nicely complements the way the iTunes.app supports .epub in RSS feeds. I’ve written two posts to my blog that you may want to draw from should you choose to write this up: Announcement: http://frank-lowney.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-support-for-epub-in-itunes-u.html More Details: http://frank-lowney.blogspot.com/2010/10/more-details-on-itunes-u-support-for.html What is iTunes U? --> http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/ For academic types, this is a major development. Of course there is...

LIU began issuing iPads to all incomming students this semester and about 3,500 iPads were handed out. Now, the program is being expanded. After a $100K investment in its wireless infrastructure, the University will be issuing iPads to all its students - not for free but at a discount resulting in a $250 price. According to the article in Campus Technology: The university said the program is designed to help students "connect with classmates, faculty members and advisers; organize, store and share files, assignments and presentations; access their academic and financial aid records; download digital books; take notes in class; and conduct...

From The Scotsman: Edinburgh University Press has posted a 16 per cent rise in income to £2.7 million in the year to 31 July following strong sales in the UK and United States and rising orders from online retailer Amazon. Pre-tax profits rose from 154,000 British Pounds to 430,000 British Pounds following "tight cost control" and were boosted by a growing contribution from the company's electronic books division. Access the Complete Article Via Resource Shelf ...