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Archive for the ‘ECTACO jetBook’ Category

Northwest Missouri State University expands e-textbook program

Monday, January 12th, 2009

By Chris Meadows

northwestlogo St. Joe News, the Kansas City Star, and the Associated Press are all carrying stories about Northwest Missouri State University’s e-textbook program, which is expanding this year from 200 students to cover about 4,000 of the university’s 6,500 students.

Dean L. Hubbard, the university’s president, says that they are limited in that some textbooks they need are not yet available as e-books. “But I would think as a realistic measure we could be totally out of the printed textbook business in three years.”

The pilot program used Sony Readers, but students felt the devices had some shortcomings in terms of not being able to jump rapidly from page to page to look up references, or take notes within the texts. Sony is incorporating feedback from the program into a more educational-based prototype, but Northwest is going ahead with a laptop/notebook-based plan for the Spring semester.

The university eventually hopes to offer e-textbooks in a variety of formats, “including laptops and iPods.”

Northwest is already a slightly unusual college in that it rents textbook bundles out to students instead of requiring them to buy and resell, and it also issues each new student a laptop.

Posted in Chris Meadows, E-books and all that, ECTACO jetBook, Sony Reader, e-book, e-book ergonomics, e-books, e-books and other digipubs, ebook, ebooks, textbooks | No Comments » | Read more..

Black Friday e-book reader deal

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

By Paul Biba

58-723-001-11.jpgThanks to our reader Dr. Ellen V. Hage for pointing this out. Newegg is selling the black ECTACO jetBook Reader for $198 with free shipping. The white version is priced at $299, so this is a good deal. According to the write-up on the site the unit only supports txt, pdf and jpg, but it might be good for some our more technically inclined readers.

Anybody else see any good deals out there?

Posted in Dr. Ellen Hage, ECTACO jetBook, Paul Biba, e-book, e-books, ebook, ebooks | 2 Comments » | Read more..

ECTACO Jetbook to incorporate EPUB and MobiPocket

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

By Paul Biba

In a step forward for open standards, ECTACO has announced that its jetBook will support EPUB in the first quarter of 2009. Additionally, the jetBook will also support MobiPocket at that time. Fodor’s Travel Guide will also be included as a pre-load on every jetBook. You can find the full press release here.

Posted in ECTACO jetBook, EPub, Mobipocket, Paul Biba, e-book, e-books, ebook, ebooks | 2 Comments » | Read more..