A caveat first. The Digital Public Library of America is evolving. What’s more, I’m a booster of the organization and of the people behind it, including the new executive director, Dan Cohen, who so decently reacted after the Boston Marathon bombings. But for now, the academic-and-hacker mindset is prevailing at the DPLA over the traditional public library one, judging from the demo’s worthy but rather limited debut yesterday. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. But then, why insist on the P word in the organization’s name? Also, the K-12 appeal so far is not quite as great as I’d hoped despite some...

This post is part of TeleRead's "Using Calibre for E-Book Management" Guide: Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 | Ch. 11 TeleRead's Juli Monroe did a great job explaining what a Calibre plugin is, and how to install one. But of course, every e-book user has their own special needs and preferences, and my own Calibre plugin mix is slightly different than hers. So, for my part of the Calibre wrap-up, I'll tell you which plugins I use, why I use them,...

What Wikipedia Can Tell Us About the Future of News (GigaOM) Children's Digital Profit Down at Scholastic As Hunger Games Fades and Digital Investment Ramps (Digital Book World) MacMillan Vows to Participate in Library eBook Lending (Good E-Reader) Dickens, Reserialized (The Digital Shift) Kindle Daily Deals: Terminal Value by Thomas Waite (and eight other books!) * * *  ...

I've seen a lot of articles lately about the high cost of textbooks. This one was about site licenses and how they penalize smaller schools. This one is about the use of e-readers in developing countries. This one is an infographic that looks at the issue from a variety of angles. It strikes me as a somewhat American obsession, this textbook habit. When I did my teacher training in New Zealand back in 2005, nobody used textbooks there. There were some resource packets produced by the government for certain curriculum areas, but other than that, you were on your own—it was your job,...

Taking into account the well-known unreliability of some of its content, I'm honestly not sure how I feel—intellectually-speaking—about the idea that it is now possible to transform random collections of Wikipedia articles into e-books. (More details about that later.) But speaking from the point of view of someone who is endlessly fascinated with the possibilities of digital reading, well ... I'd certainly be lying if I said I wasn't going to play around with Wikipedia's new e-book export feature for a good 20 minutes, as soon as this article is posted. * * * According to a post on the Wikimedia Foundation's Tech...

I read a few articles recently on how ebooks affect learning. On the con side, these articles pointed out that textbooks are often less available in ebook (true), that the e-versions which do exist are clunky and limited (true) and that for some types of learning, people really do absorb information better off paper than off screens (debatable). I had one bad experience myself with a formal e-textbook required for an official course, and I agree with some of the points these commentators made. But on the pro side, reader technology has made my non-formal, personal reading smarter, easier and...

Today the Wikimedia Foundation announced a demonstration of a forthcoming new WYSIWYG editor for Wikipedia, in the hope that making it easier for people to edit without having to understand confusing symbols or wikitext markup will lead more people to edit the wiki. The idea is that you shouldn’t have to learn a new coding language in order to contribute what you know. (According to TechCrunch, only about 0.7% of Wikipedia users are active contributors to the site, making up about half of the entries.) While the demonstration version still lacks a number of key features and is restricted...

On GigaOm, Mathew Ingram posits that the traditional structure of the news article may not be ideally serving today’s readers. Some articles discussing current events may be loaded with terminology that some readers can’t understand—but adding background would waste space from the point of those who know the subject well. In the current on-line era, of course, there are plenty of external sources of information that could be linked—such as Wikipedia, if nothing else—but many papers don’t bother with that sort of linking, and if they did link would rather link internally to their own sources in order to...

I wrote, a couple of April Fool’s Days ago, that the rash of fake stories on April 1 might serve as good practice for us to use all year ‘round in figuring out whether that story our friends emailed to us is true. It turns out that redditors—the denizens of news discussion forum site Reddit—have that ability in spades. The Atlantic recently posted an article about a college course professor T. Mills Kelly offers from time to time at George Mason University which tries to teach its students to become better at evaluating historical fact by creating historical...

From the Wikimedia Technical Blog (blockquotes omitted): If you’d like to read Wikipedia in an airplane (of the offline variety) or in an area with no or limited connectivity, or install it in a university, or just to have it handy in case of a zombie apocalypse, you can now download a full text copy of the English Wikipedia (from January 2012) in the convenient OpenZIM format, which was specifically developed for sharing wiki content. OpenZIM files can be read in multiple reader applications, the most popular of which is Kiwix, available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Sugar. Start your BitTorrent client and...

A number of websites are going dark tomorrow to protest the SOPA legislation that could impose harsh restrictions upon the Internet. These sites include Mozilla, reddit for 12 hours, and Wikipedia for a full 24 hours. Google will also place a SOPA-related link on its homepage. Wales explained that the Wikipedia blackout comes as a result of feedback from the Wikipedia community, Not everybody is sanguine about the blackout. On just-launched Silicon Valley news site Pando Daily, Paul Carr writes in agreement with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s tweet calling the decision “foolish”. Carr blasts Wales for “[making] a...

Wikipedia isn’t the only site considering a public demonstration of the evils of SOPA. Scribd has gone ahead and done it. Scribd has added a script to its page that blanks out documents word by word before users’ eyes, followed by a pop-up explaining what’s happening and why we should all be concerned about SOPA. This analysis of why SOPA is unconstitutional is cited as an example. (At least, in theory. It didn’t work on my computer, nor on those of some others who posted comments on Scribd’s post.) That puts me in mind of a tool I...