One of our big gripes against Gemstar has been the troubled company's contempt for user-created material, whether in K-12 or elsewhere. Never mind teachers, librarians and others with their own gems to share with students and so on. Mortals are supposed to buy from the standard publishers. New Gemstar software is especially good--or bad, shall we say?--at thwarting do-it-yourself folks.

So we were delighted to read, via CanadaComputes.com, that Palm Digital Media has K-12 discounts on the eBookStudio program for the creation of your own content. Versions are available for the Palm OS, PC, Mac, standard Windows, and the Tablet PC. If you're going in the direction of a proprietary format, at least choose one that won't limit you to overpriced books from the usual suspects.

Along the way, in her useful roundup on e-books and K-12, CanadaComputes.com writer Christine Waleski also passes on various people's perspectives on the future direction of e-books as replacements for traditonal textbooks and other p-books. She mentions TeleRead, Project Gutenberg and the new International Children's Library. As we noted to her, the TeleRead model is hardly for the U.S. only. It could be especially useful in other countries such as Canada where vast distances can separate well-stocked physical libraries.

One minor clarification of the story: We were discussing e-ink displays as a technology on the horizon, not a feature of present Tablet PC models. One way or another, however, displays will get much better--making e-books a more intriguing alternative to conventional textbooks. Sorry, CanadaComputes, if we weren't clearer. Confusingly, Microsoft has used "electronic 'ink'" in a hand-writing recognition context when describing the current Tablet PC.
posted by David Rothman at 11:42 PM | permanent link

"We've argued before that various eating establishments are better off offering free Wi-Fi to their customers than trying to squeeze the extra cash out of their pockets. Here's yet another example of a place that has realized this. Some pubs in the UK are now offering free Wi-Fi to customers, saying that those customers are paying for it by coming in and ordering food that they wouldn't have ordered otherwise. That's the same argument that Schlotzky's Deli has made in the US, and it makes a lot of sense. These places aren't in the business of providing internet access. They're in the business of serving food - and the internet access should be seen as a promotional concept to convince more people to come into their establishments to buy more food. Unfortunately, companies like Boingo are going around trying to convince companies that they need to make extra money off of these things, and are making adoption much slower. Why restaurants think they should pretend they're in the ISP business is beyond me." - Techdirt.

The TeleRead take: True, true, true. Imagine the problems for the big boys if, via Wi-Fi, the best business model for the Net turns out to be "free" in many cases--even without ads? Apps like e-books just don't require that much bandwidth by broadband standards. Meanwhile I see Wi-Fi continues to give grief to cell carriers.
posted by David Rothman at 10:29 PM | permanent link

"When Ruth Ann Hopps goes to Powell's Books in Portland, she sometimes lingers at the store for hours with a list in hand. After her October trip, she left with 10 pages of books she still wanted to buy for the kids. But Hopps isn't shopping for her family. The librarian is trying to buy books on the cheap and track down hard-to-find items for more than 800 students at Madras High School. Sometimes she's bought best sellers for the school library at Costco. With the high school's book buying budget at about 20 percent of what it was five years ago, the veteran librarian has to be creative to make her library grow. Like librarians throughout the state, Hopps is struggling to maintain a collection in tight budget times. As the number of students at Madras High School has increased her book buying budget has plummeted. Five years ago, Hopps had about $10,000 to spend on books. This year she has $2,000." - The Bend Bulletin, Dec. 1, via Library Stuff.

The TeleRead take: Sad, isn't it? Why must the librarian scamble this way to try to help her students enjoy a decent variety of titles? Talk about the need for TeleRead as a cost-effective way to distribute books!
posted by David Rothman at 9:39 PM | permanent link