7 Things You Should Know About eReaders

EDUCAUSE has an excellent series of 2-page quick reads/handouts called 7 Things You Should Know About.... We'll be sharing a number of these in the blog in the coming weeks and months.

eReaders put books, newspapers, magazines, and other materials in a book-sized device that holds thousands of pages. I never thought I'd like digital books until I installed the Kindle app on my iPhone and discovered how much easier it is to hold than a book and how handy it is to have a book everywhere I go. eReaders aren't generally as small as an iPhone, but they are still more portable than carrying dozens of books at once. 7 Things You Should Know About E-Readers (PDF) will give you some technical details about eReaders along with how they are and can be used in education. This quick to read 2-page guide covers what it is, how it works, who's doing it (including textbook publishers), why eReaders are a significant technology, what the downsides are, where it's going, and what the implications are for teaching and learning.

Possibly the most popular, or at least the most well-known eReader is Amazon's Kindle. If you'd like to see what it's like, we have a Kindle DX at CTEL. Just contact a course designer or David Vardeman (vardeman@usm.maine.edu) to check it out. We're particularly interested in what you think of reading a textbook on an eReader, so if you use a textbook that has a Kindle edition, let us know!

For additional related reading, Knowledge@Wharton delves into the economics of digital textbooks and The New York Times reports on the ability for profs to create their own or change existing digital textbooks.