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Ebooks, Textbooks and Digital Storytelling

Ebooks, Textbooks and Digital Storytelling. By Robert Nagle www.teleread.org/blog May 11, 2007. Preface . Presentation will be put up on my idiotprogrammer weblog and probably teleread as well If you want to make comments, add them to the teleread blog post about it.

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Ebooks, Textbooks and Digital Storytelling

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  1. Ebooks, Textbooks and Digital Storytelling • By • Robert Nagle • www.teleread.org/blog • May 11, 2007

  2. Preface • Presentation will be put up on my idiotprogrammer weblog and probably teleread as well • If you want to make comments, add them to the teleread blog post about it. • I have delicious links for everything • http://del.icio.us/rjnagle/uhlecture

  3. Outline Preface: Who am I? • How do you read a book? • How do you make a book? • How do you anticipate a Story?

  4. How do you read a book? An Idiographic Analysis

  5. Geography Does Make a Difference! • Houston bus • Lunch hour • Peace Corps Albania & Ukraine • Back to US • Lunch hours in Austin • Books on tape • Boston/DC mass transit • Waiting in line

  6. Where do you read a book? • Bed • Lazy Boy chair • Bathtub • At work/on way to work • Dinner table • Web surfing • Reading to sleep • Reading in total darkness (backlighting) • Print Books and dim lamp • Reading on the Run • RSS Reader on my pda

  7. How do you read a book? • Check the reviews; afterwards, check the reviews again! • Read the first chapter. After end, I always reread the first chapter • Critical Essays • Highlighting. High School/College • Word definitions • Bookmarks-- Always lose my place. • technical manuals--often in medias res

  8. How do you read a book? • One novel vs. several. • Pile by my bed • Having complete works on my ebook reader • Arnold Bennett, Henry James, Shakespeare • Then you discover hidden gems (and realize there are hundreds, if not thousands of others) • Alternate versions/editions • Whitman’s Song of Myself (Deathbed Edition vs. All the Rest).

  9. Beasts of Burden: Collecting • 1993 New Braunfels Factory Outlet Store; Buyer’s Remorse • Moving • Why People buy a house (and move) • Amazon Wishlists vs. bookstores • Eventually everything becomes 99 cents!

  10. Ebook Revolution, 2004

  11. 2007: The Year Flash Memory Became Dirt Cheap! • 8 gigs CF card = 80$ • 4 gig Project Gutenberg DVD has 17,000 titles! • Bruce Sterling: envisioned LOC in his pocket

  12. Horn of Plenty

  13. “Bestsellers” for Today

  14. E-Books vs. Web Pages vs. Print Pages: • Ebooks: Better navigation, TOC, indices, keeps you trapped (must concentrate) ; Sustained reading is more possible. • Web Book Reader in Browser: Always Up-to-Date, comments; better design possibilities. but requires online access, • RSS Feed Reader: Organization is mainly chronological (that’s limiting!). Can serve as offline reader. • Print: “Smell of the Book,” Ability to look at two pages at once; Better Font & Layout Variety.

  15. Is Reading Just Old-Fashioned? • Youtube, Secondlife, HBO, PS2 • Publishing Industry in decline? • A crisis in literacy?

  16. The Bane of Publishers

  17. My childhood books

  18. Text as “Illustrations” for the Art • Kingdom Hearts

  19. When will Dylan want to read/write? • James Paul Gee’s “semiotic domains” or “situated meanings”

  20. Text vs. Audio vs. Video vs. Games • Read 300-350 words per minute (vs. 140 wpm for audio) • Easier to scan/browse/search (can find within text) • Less intrusive/noisy • Easier to cite/refer to (that might be changing) • Lower production costs

  21. Think about 9/11 • How did you find information about WTC? • Did you keep on the TV news that day? Was this an efficient way to track the event? • Years later, how would you locate information about: 1)a victims, 2)the terrorist plot, 3)the president’s response, 4)the timeline, 5)people’s opinions about why it happened

  22. Devices, Devices, Devices

  23. Why buy an ebook device? • Space Saving • Can modify font size • Quick jumping between books • Access to all that Public Domain stuff! • Laptops are hot! Expensive! Heavy! Suck up batteries! • Won’t help you download John Updike or Saul Bellow, but it will help you download web-only content and young writers • BUT Da Vinci Code is cheaper as a used print book than an ebook.

  24. Ebooks and DIY books • Project Gutenberg produced books • Best Site for ebooks is www.manybooks.net (all formats). • What you don’t anticipate is how often you will end up creating your own ebook (usually out of your own material or out or material from the web). • Scanning your own books? 1863 Houston Sci fi short story

  25. Ebook: Frustrations, Disappointment • Expensive • Single Purpose Device vs. Convergent Device • Can’t Transfer Ebooks • Tied into Ecommerce Store • Manufacturer’s Mistake: assuming that people buy these things so they can buy more content (aka the “Itunes Fallacy”)

  26. What People Will Pay And Expect • $1500: Extreme Portability, Great Battery Life, Great Display, Touchscreen, Multipurpose, DRM • $600-750: Multimedia, Great Battery, color • $300-400: • PDA (Multipurpose, Small Screen) or E-ink Device (Great Display, Battery Life), wifi • E-ink Reader: Grayscale, Outstanding Battery Life and Limited Formats, mp3 player, no wifi • $200-250: Magic Price Point? (Nothing here?!) Cellphones • $100-150: Bought on Ebay; Old Devices that still work wonderfully when used solely for reading (battery life sucks?!) • $50 Keychains, mp3 memory sticks,

  27. 2007: Fierce Competition in the $300-400 space • Sony Reader • Not Another E-Book (NAEB-Bookeen) • Jinke Hanlin V3 • Amazon.com Kindle Reader But will it drive prices down?

  28. Ebook Beauty Contestant #1 Jinke V3 (Released Fall, 2007?) Wacom Pen Touchscreen Mp3 player & Wifi. Proprietary Formats SD Card holds up to 4 gigs.

  29. Ebook Beauty Contestant #2 • Sony Reader (Nov 2006) • No Touchscreen, Sort of Complicated • Buy from Sony Connect Store • Can read Encrypted Books from Sony Connect Store , but inventory is limited • Can Read PDF, DOC, but not HTML!

  30. Not Another Ebook Reader (NAEB) (June-July 2007?) No ability to read encrypted content (no buying from Amazon!) Popular backing from Baen Sci Fi Publishing Can read both Mobi, HTML, Doc, PDF Ebook Beauty Contestant #3

  31. Dark Horse Contestants: Educational Devices • One Laptop per Child $150 • Plans to sell it in US? • Viewed as a learning tool, not an ebook reader • Digital Textbook (Korea)$100 • Touchpad • Provided for all Schools and Students between 2008-2011

  32. Scorecard for Judging Devices • Does it Read/Import HTML? • Can it automatically create/read RSS feeds? • Is it easy to use? • How much flash memory does it support?

  33. Criteria for Evaluating Book Solutions • Can students/teachers create their own ebooks? Can you import html files? • Do they have permanent licenses to the books they buy? • What notetaking capability is possible? group notes? • Built in Dictionaries? Foreign Language dictionaries? • Cut/Paste, Printing from Desktop?

  34. Uses of an educational reader • Critiques of Laptops for Kids. But access to greater variety of material • Teacher-created anthologies • Reduce backsprain

  35. High Costs of School Textbooks • Reduce costs of print textbooks (700$/yr) • Newer editions 60% more expensive than older editions • Teachers are often not aware of actual prices of textbook even when they ask Ebook Readers/Books don’t solve the Pedagogical problems of teaching material. Instead, they increase the amount of material available to students and make it easy for them to access this material away from the laptop.

  36. Making Textbooks Affordable • Why Can’t Teachers Collaborate on their own textbooks/course material? Norton Anthology of Literature, Package A and B ($100) • Key questions are: ensuring quality, packaging in an ebook friendly format and providing course outlines/objectives/study material • Makes it easier to introduce already free material into the classroom and make it available at home.

  37. DIY Textbooks • www.stingyscholar.com

  38. Sophie Reader (www.sophieproject.org) • Open Source produced by Future of the Book • Can embed graphics, audio and video • “Networked Book,” saved on net, with ability of readers to embed comments on pages; • Authors can pull resources from web repositories • Based on Voyager/Voyager Japan/T3 authoring platform • Funded partly by Mellon Foundation • Beta version of Reader out by Sept 2007; 1.0 out by December. • Tie-ins with One laptop per child project. • Decentralized Servers? • Ambitious, buggy, mindshare? Adobe? Standards?

  39. Dot Reader http://www.dotreader.com/) • Software for Laptop. • Allows annotation by readers/students; with web servers letting you store comments • They’ve solved the chicken or egg problem! (USB Keychains/Flash Media) • Both Sophie and Dotreader have some commitment to open standards

  40. Mobipocket Creator—free Ebook Creator

  41. Mobipocket: Adding Content

  42. Building the Ebook (With Password Protection?)

  43. Adobe Reader • It’s a print standard, not a reflowable standard • Works horribly on devices • Creation Tools are expensive • Advantages: Excellent Accessibility and Multimedia Capabilities (+ Flash) • Adobe Digital Editions—new reader suited for reflowable content (but what about devices?)

  44. Producing a PDF Book • Not simple for individuals • MS Office doesn’t have a plugin for PDF conversion, and yet Openoffice does • Online Zamzar file conversion site does it for free. http://www.zamzar.com/ • Google Docs: • Save as HTML, PDF, doc, txt • Revert to previous versions • Collaborative editing • Can use as Text Editor for most blogging software (XML-RPC)

  45. Other Tools: DIY Books • Web Scrapers/ Sunrise Desktop • Photo Albums with Stories attached to them. “Text is illustration for the photo” • RSS Readers

  46. 3. How to Anticipate a Story

  47. Designing for Creativity • Web Developer’s interest in understanding group dynamics • If you create a versatile-enough platform that is open to all kinds of input, massive creativity will ensue • Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks: Peer Production produces great results (i.e, Wikipedia). But what about creativity?

  48. Constraints on Creativity • Public domain has been cancelled until 2018. We are stuck at the year 1922. Ex. All Quiet on the Western Front • Pre-1972 American Music Won’t go into the public domain until 2067 • (Many American musicians are already in public domain in Europe, but not in USA: Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Louie Armstrong, all early Jazz) • When Andrew Sister’s 1936 hit song Bei Mir Bist Du Schon enters Public Domain, all of us will be dead.

  49. Media companies thank you! • Using Trademark to Suppress Creativity • Harry Potter™, Star Wars ™, Simpsons™ • Fair Use: Lessig: fair use is having the freedom to pay a legal team to defend you in court • Educational Exemptions: Teach Act

  50. Progression • Modernism • Postmodernism • Anti-postmodernism

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