Chegg -- Connected!

Here's an eTextbook reader that provides the ability to collaborate with peers. Chegg advertises:

• Anytime, anywhere access across all connected devices
• Search, highlight, take notes & see key highlights from other students
• Instant access to Chegg's network of students and experts for 24/7 math & science help

Pressbooks for ePublishing: Connected!

Reprinted from: http://wpmu.org/an-introduction-to-pressbooks-a-digital-book-publishing-tool-built-on-wordpress/

Pressbooks (now in public beta) is "a simple online book production tool, exporting books as: EPUB (for Kindle, iBooks, etc), typeset PDF (for print), and web (public or private). PressBooks is powerful enough for publishers, and simple enough for authors. It sits atop WordPress, but it’s a complete reworking, tailored for making and distributing a book."

Connected! Since the tool is built on WordPress MultiUser (each book is a “blog,” and each chapter is a “post”), this might be a great way to have students (or teams of teachers) collaborate on the creation of an eBook. There are plans in the works to also enable importing from an existing WordPress blog, as well as integrate social media and marketing tools.

Reported as the future focus of Pressbooks:

1. We want to help make it really easy and really cheap for all kinds of publishers (from single authors to huge companies) to make beautiful books in many formats
2. We want to really explore what it means to have “books” online as structured web objects…

Check out their demo slides, visit the PressBooks website and sign up to get started.

Inkling 2

Reprinted from the MacWord "Eddy" awards:

An Inkling textbook on an iPad.

Reading books on the iPad is nothing new. We’ve got iBooks, the Kindle app, and who-knows-how-many PDF readers. But one app shows you what reading on the iPad should be like. Inkling licenses textbooks from traditional publishers then adapts the content for the iPad. But those adaptations aren’t just replicas of the print original. Rather, the texts are completely revamped to take advantage of what the tablet can do. For example, there are no pages as such. Chapters are broken down into “cards,” which scroll continuously up and down the screen. Within those cards, static illustrations are augmented by interactive multimedia—full audio and video, of course, but also animated diagrams and rotating wireframes you can examine from every angle. 

Version 2.0, which came out in August 2011, adds social tools: You can now share notes and annotations with classmates and others using the same text. Inkling has adapted more than fifty undergraduate and graduate textbooks so far, and that’s only the start: The company plans to apply its technology to cookbooks and other reference materials, too. The future of publishing on the iPad? It could well be.—DAN MILLER

Booktrack: Soundtracks that match what you are reading.

This just in from Business Insider ... "like movies have soundtracks, now books can have soundtracks." ... "In the coming weeks and months, Booktrack will also create editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, The Three Musketeers, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Romeo and Juliet and more."

Read the full story: http://www.businessinsider.com/booktracks-2011-8#ixzz1W9HU2dzc

Try it out here ... Download the iPad version of Sherlock Holmes

Unlike traditional audio books, Booktrack is a soundtrack that will match what you are reading, AS YOU READ (Note: no one is reading the story to you). You can now truly hear what it’s like to be back in Holmes time with the suspense of Dr. Watson helping Holmes solve a case, horse’s hooves beating against the pavement while the tension rises in the air, and when they sit before a fire you will hear the wood crinkling in the background as Holmes and Watson solve another mystery. The personalized sound effects and composition makes the story more powerful and immersive than it has ever been heard before!

View a trailer for Sherlock Holmes Speckled Band Booktrack:

From http://www.booktrack.com

So basically, it enhances your reading experience, by providing sound effects, and a "score" as you would be hearing if you were watching the movie instead of reading. Interesting idea, don't you think?

Push Pop Press = no more ebooks

Today's article, "Why we'll never have innovative e-books" from Tim Carmody at WIRED (published on CNN Tech) reports that Facebook is acquiring Push Pop Press -- the e-publishing startup company that created Al Gore's iPad ebook "The Choice." Carmody is bummed and so am I. He writes,

We sorely need independent innovation in digital publishing. We need talented people who are willing to try things. Meanwhile, all of the money, attention and technological skill is marching in the opposite direction. 

Most big media companies with plenty of capital and deep technical talent see few if any reasons to innovate or invest in books.

I'm especially disappointed since co-creator Mike Matas, who spoke at a recent TED Talk, imagined building a tool for publishers (see my post on 5/5/11) to create similar interactive books. If books are to become electronic, we need to be sure that they are not just "digitized text" and will take full advantage of the power of personal learning, made possible by devices like the iPad.

EPUB3 -- a game changer?

Back in January 2011 O'Reilly.com reported that EPUB3 (the newest revision of the EPUB standard) was soon to be released, (http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/01/epub3-preview.html) and offered predictions of the changes this could bring to digital publishing:

Bob Kasher: There are three key areas EPUB3 is focused around: language support, greater accessibility, and increased multimedia support. Language support will allow EPUB3 to save and search non-Roman scripts — such as Japanese, Chinese and Arabic — as font characters rather than JPEGs, as in current EPUB support. This will make a much broader range of literature available to current and future reading devices from base EPUB files. It will truly internationalize EPUB.

EPUB3 will also be better at integrating the current DAISY accessibility standards, to help make reading devices of greater usefulness to visually impaired readers.

EPUB3 will be much more adept at supporting multimedia capabilities for both HTML5-based devices and the coming generation of tablets supporting both Flash and HTML5. It is hoped that in doing so, EPUB3 will help develop an enhanced ebook standard that can be used across a variety of media and content.

Other developments include enhanced metadata support for discoverability, better facilitation support for touchscreen devices, and support for MathML, which we hope will open up greater opportunities for textbook publishers. EPUB3 will be a quantum leap forward in capabilities for future device support, but still backward compatible with current devices on the market.

O'Reilly followed up on this recently: http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/epub3-enhanced-ebooks.html and noted that EPUB3 could "yield enhanced books" that will work on a variety of devices. Up until now, the iPad has been the only device that supports embedded media files.

It keeps getting better and better!

College students views on eBooks vs. Paper

A recent "Inside Higher Ed" survey shows that although digital textbooks are ready for college, students are not quite ready to give up their "dead trees:"

Only 5 percent of the survey respondents said they purchased access to an e-textbook this spring. Two percent bought e-textbooks for more than one class. The most common reason for going electronic? “My professor required me to.”

Although, more than half of the 1200 students surveyed expressed an interest in "e-readers," noting the iPad as a popular choice.