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The Atavist is produced using our Atavist custom publishing platform, which makes mobile publishing as easy as blogging. Available for licensing, the system seamlessly weaves together your text, video, audio, photos, and timelines, then exports your content to iPhone/iPad apps, ePub files, and other reading platforms.
“There is no future of the digital book — not the way we envision it today,” said Matt MacInnis, the founder and CEO of Inkling, the San Francisco startup that’s re-conceptualizing books for the digital realm.
The Academicpub application gives educators the ability to create their own custom books — in print and e-book format. Our application provides real-time copyright clearance and an ever-expanding content library along with the ability to add your own materials and articles from the web. And - peer recommendations from colleagues in your discipline can present new possibilities to enrich your courses.
"...a new build-your-own-textbook service called AcademicPub, which arranged payment of royalties and compiled the material for publication. His students were given three options for buying the book: Download a digital edition for $14.95, get it in paperback for $27, or go for the hardcover for $45."
the Book Genome Project was created to identify, track, measure, and study the multitude of features that make up a book. Components such as language, character, and theme are mined and analyzed in order to sift, organize, categorize and ultimately separate one book from another in a crowded and complex "bookosphere."
dotEPUB is software in the cloud that allows you to convert any webpage into an e-book.
A report released this week from the Pew Internet Project said ereader ownership growth in the U.S. doubled in six months, from 6% to 12% of adults owning an ebook reader.
Loads more coverage to come on the topic of the “reader experience”—what it is, how to design for it—in my forthcoming book “Breaking the Page“. Meantime, below is a list of all the apps and websites I mentioned.
A 2010 study by OnCampus Research found that 74% of college students surveyed still prefer to use a printed textbook. Where some see non-adopters, others see untapped markets, and thus large and small players alike have long been targeting the digital textbook niche. Here are some of the ways they’re looking to get students to trade their print for pixels.
Pine Point, instead, is an example of something that couldn’t exist in any other medium. Its creators describe it as “part book, part film, part website”, which sounds about right; it mixes audio, video, still photos, prose, and movable images to tell the story of a Canadian town that was abandoned, and then demolished, in the late 1980s.
Up and Running with Node.js
Tom Hughes-Croucher
Copyright © 2010
Some of these solutions get you an iPad app, some get you ePub, some are for web-based books.
3 major findings
Survey respondents indicated that 98 percent had Internet access at home and 46 percent had purchased some kind of an e-book before.
More students purchased digital licenses.
In a control group of students whose professors required them to purchase physical textbooks, 46 percent bought the material.
But in the pilot, 73 percent of students rented digital textbooks. And that's a good thing for learning because more students have access to the content they need, said Gerry Hanley, senior director of the CSU Academic Technology Services and executive director of MERLOT.
The digital material was easy to use.
When asked how easy it was to use an e-textbook, 53 percent of students said it was easy, 25 percent said they were neutral, and 22 percent didn't agree that they were easy to use.
Students liked the cost, the keyword search and the lightweight option that digital textbooks provided.
The e-books did not give most students a satisfactory user experience.
Respectively, a third of the students were satisfied, neutral or dissatisfied with their experience. The e-textbooks still make students feel like they're reading a book on the Web, so their responses reflected this state of affairs, Hanley said.
Upper division students preferred the e-textbooks more than the general education students did, probably because they've used more digital resources for their research.
And the majority of students liked to read the text online rather than downloading it. The explanation for this preference is unclear. But Hanley surmised that students found it easier to type in a URL and password instead of going through the extra steps required to download it.
As a result of the survey findings, the CSU system is working with digital textbook publishers and distributors to improve the student experience with e-textbooks.
“That satisfaction has to be significantly improved," Hanley said. "You can’t have a third dissatisfied and a third neutral and only have a third like it.”
We preserve the best of the old — books by leading experts, peer‑reviewed and developed to high editorial standards, fully supported by review copies, teaching supplements and great service. Then we change everything. Our textbooks are:
Free online
Affordable offline
Open–licensed
Customizable by educators
Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, College Open Textbooks is a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving the awareness and advocacy for open textbooks.
A software company and an Australian bookstore are experimenting with books in the cloud.
"This is a listing of 260 sites that legally offer free books (eBooks) for download or for online viewing."
Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.
Please note that Anthologize cannot be installed on blogs hosted at WordPress.com.
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