iPad Makes Some Changes

Our new reference librarian is also a rabid Mac devotee. She was recently watching the Jobs keynote address and noticed that he mentioned the iPad had added notetaking in its software upgrade. That is something we were waiting for in order to consider it as an ereader for textbooks. Essentially, Christina said:

Here is the link to the most recent keynote address from Apple: http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1006ad9g4hjk/event/index.html

Here are some of the more interesting parts of the speech concerning the iPad:

2:15 – start of iPad presentation

6:30 – interesting little tidbit about magazines and an app called Elements ($13.99)

7:30 – iBooks (this is the most relevant part to Berkeley)

10:20 – end of iPad presentation

Highlights of the presentation:

- 5 of the biggest publishers of e-books report that 22% of their total e-book sales are occurring on the iPad.

- There is a new software update (free but won’t be available until later this month) that adds the ability to highlight, make notes, bookmark multiple pages, and view pdf files.

- Links to your highlighted portions and bookmarks are available on the book’s table of contents.

So there you have it. First, kindles in the high schools. Now with iPads adding annotations and notetaking are iPads far behind? They certainly are sexier and flashier and more user friendly. Apple does have a history of letting you share tunes (ten times),so perhaps you can share books as well? Too soon to tell, but my pen is itching to write that check.

Kindles in the High School

My local public high school, Clearwater High, will be getting rid of all of their print textbooks and going to an ereader next year. They will be purchasing an ereader for all their faculty and students the St. Pete Times reported yesterday. It appeared that Kindle had the lead, but the story did mention that they had to go to bid and had not settled on a vendor yet.

The story only makes a vague reference to the independent school that got rid of the books in its library, saying only: "A Massachusetts boarding school recently made waves by completely digitizing its library."

I think that moving to etextbooks is where ereaders are appropriate technology. However, I'm not sure that we're at the point where we can completely support etextbooks on an ereader and I hope that the principal has researched whether Amazon has all the textbooks he uses available on the Kindle. There have been problems with highlighting and notetaking with the Kindles, so this will be an interesting experiment to follow. It is a bit worrisome that they are taking a one-size fits all approach to this problem though. [Additional info: The Tampa Tribune has a more informative article and explains that they are doing the texts in stages with Math and English first.]

As one commenter wrote: "Kindles, Nooks, and the like are great tools, but I am not sure they are 504 compliant which could be a problem for visually or hearing impaired students. One e-reader that is about to launch is a free software download called Blio ( http://www.blio.com ). It will work across platforms and on most devices; it is also 504 compliant. For the cost of a Kindle, a school could outfit each student with a netbook that has the Blio software on it (it is FREE). The netbooks would be much more useful for many other assignments as well. Why not try to get the most bang for your buck?????"

I'll be following this story closely.