On Tuesday, May 3rd I recorded a 15 minute segment for the Southwestern Ohio Council for Higher Education on Think TV, the local public television station in Dayton, Ohio.  My topic was the rise of digital textbooks and options available for students and faculty to access and produce textbooks and learning materials.  Below is a [...]

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This CIL session was presented by Chad Mairn, Information Services Librarian at St. Petersberg College and Al Carlson, System Administrator for the Tampa Bay Library Consortium. Al Carlson: Library automation, the internet, and EPUB are the three big things he feels have hit the library industry during his career. The book is the content and [...]

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Great article today in Inside Higher Education, All in the Delivery, that discusses the rise of eBooks in higher education, specifically for textbooks.  Kindle, iPad, CourseSmart, FlatWorld Knowledge, and of course print, are discussed in the context of the best method for delivery of academic ebooks.  The author, Steve Kolowich, offers a nice overview and [...]

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I can tell that fall is in the air, nearly every article on my list this week has to do with eTextbooks.  Other good ones are there too, check them out.  Happy reading. Robert Boissy of Springer on the Future of Ebooks and Libraries An iPad book for the deaf The State of the E-Textbook [...]

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Earlier this week I attended the O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference for the first time.  Over 1250 attendees gathered in New York City to discuss and network   about issues and trends in publishing, in particular, digital publishing.  While much of the information presented was for the publishing industry, I did manage to find several [...]

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TOC great session on POD here – publishers really should consider this option – “leaving money on the table” if you aren’t # TOC – summary of digital printing session here: http://www.libraries.wright.edu/noshelfrequired/?p=503 # TOC ebook contracts session – my summary here: http://www.libraries.wright.edu/noshelfrequired/?p=516 # #TOCCON stronger copyright protection can’t make a consumer buy/watch something they don’t [...]

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Tools of Change Conference – Future of Digital Textbooks, Feb. 23 10:45- 11:30 Speakers:  John Warren (Moderator) , Eric Frank, Flatworld Knowledge; Frank Lyman, CourseSmart; Nicholas Smith, Agile Mind; and Neeru Khosle, CK12 Foundation Questions: What is your company doing? What challenge or problem are you trying to solve? Give an example of a successful [...]

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Day One, TOC Conference, about 1200 attendees in the North and South Ballrooms of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square.  Good lineup for keynotes this morning including:  Peter Collingridge with Enhanced Editions, William Patry with Google, Skip Prichard from Ingram Content Group, Sameer Shariff from Impelsys, and Arianna Huffington from the Huffington Post. Andrew Savikas, [...]

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Interesting article in the NYT today about Barnes & Noble’s textbook rental program.  According to the article, textbooks can be rented from college bookstores for about 42% of the retail price.  B & N piloted the program last year in a few schools, it has now been expanded to 25 campuses.  Renting textbooks isn’t a [...]

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The University System of Ohio introduced a textbook portal last week.  This portal, developed by programmers at OhioLINK, searches many sources for textbooks including:  OhioLINK catalog, OhioLINK Electronic Book Center, Safari Tech Books Online, and CourseSmart, an electronic textbook provider.   Textbooks located on CourseSmart can be leased for about 50% of the print cost.  OhioLINK students [...]

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