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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The Ohio Digital Bookshelf, Where will the 2nd Year Take Us?  A Webinar from the University System of Ohio TeachU, Presented by Stephen R. Acker, Research Director, The Ohio Digital Bookshelf The slides for the webinar are available on slideshare and the webinar archive. The following is a summary of my interpretation of the webinar.  [...]

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The New York Times reported that Inkling, an interactive textbook development company who make textbooks for the iPad, has received funding from two large textbook publishers, Pearson and McGraw Hill. From the article: “The amount invested by Pearson and McGraw-Hill, among the biggest textbook publishers, was not disclosed. Inkling’s total investment to date, including money [...]

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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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Where Do Libraries Fit in the Ebook Ecosystem? | Digital Book World The rise of the 99-cent Kindle e-book – CNET News The New Economics of the University Press — A Report from the AAUP Ohio System teams with Flat World Knowledge on free digital textbooks Interview with Ingram’s Skip Prichard Iowa to Launch Statewide [...]

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McGraw-Hill’s iPad-enhanced ebooks by Inkling Could the Kindle be free by the end of the year? Barnes & Noble claims 25% of US e-book market share David Rothman promotes the National Digital Library on the Chronicle of Higher Education Go To Hellman: HarperCollins and the Suspension of eBook … Podcast: The Future of the Textbook, [...]

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Jeff Shelstad, Founder and CEO of FlatWorld Knowledge spoke first. Jeff provided some stats on higher education: 19.1 million students in 2010 in college $850 avg spent on textbook so, it’s about a 10billion industry Cengage, Pearson, McGraw-Hill are the big 3 publishers along with many other small ones Problem is that the industry has outworn [...]

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Received this email from Ingram today:  Ingram’s VitalSource launches Bookshelf® application for  iPad™, iPhone®, and iPod Touch®—now offers three ways to access content LA VERGNE, TN – Vital Source Technologies, Inc., the leading e-textbook solution provider for publishers, academic institutions and students today announced the availability of the VitalSource Bookshelf application for Apple’s iPad™, iPhone®, [...]

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Just saw an article about Kno, a new company launching a digital textbook platform and reader.  The device offers a two panel tablet for viewing textbook material in true form by maintaining page structure, charts, graphs, and other non-text elements.  The device allows note taking and highlighting and offers Wi-Fi and 3-G access.  Kno has [...]

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Last years law suit against 4 Universities piloting the Kindle reader as a eTextbook solution has done a lot to guarantee the accessibility of textbooks to all students. Ingram Content Group, working with the American Foundation for the Blind consulting group (AFB Consulting), announced a new disability release for their eTextbook platform – VitalSource.  The [...]

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