Devices to Take Textbooks Beyond Text
A lot of the talk about digital reading devices has centered around their usefulness for textbook-toting students. Although the ability to carry a lot of hefty textbooks around on one much smaller device is a big plus, the drawback has been that the monochrome screens of current ereaders don’t allow for presentation of material that involves more than just text (i.e., illustrations, figures, tables). But, according to this article, all that may be changing:
Now there is a new approach that may adapt well to textbook pages: two-screen e-book readers with a traditional e-paper display on one screen and a liquid-crystal display on the other to render graphics like science animations in color.
Expect news of these new devices in January and February 2010 to compete with Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and the Sony Reader.
David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times, reviews the Nook, which he says is astonishingly similar to the Amazon Kindle. He calls the Nook’s missing features “symptoms of B&N’s bad case of Ship-at-All-Costs-itis. But the biggest one of all is the Nook’s half-baked software.”
How E-Books Will Change Reading And Writing
The Kindle and other electronic reading devices have already started to make their mark, but they may begin to change the very words authors commit to posterity. Lynn Neary talks to Rick Moody, Lev Grossman and Nicholas Carr about the way these devices are shaping the publishing world.
From NPR.
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