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This blog is dedicated to the topics of Course materials, Innovation, and Technology in Education. it is intended as an information source for the college store industry, or anyone interested in how course materials are changing. Suggestions for discussion topics or news stories are welcome.

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Friday, July 10, 2009

Digital Happenings

Starting last week we included a posting of a short list of other news and articles from the week that caught our interest. We received some positive feedback, and so here again this week is a collection of overflow stories and links from the past few days that might be of interest:

  • A recent article from eSchool News discusses George Gilder’s prediction for the future of network computing at universities. Gilder believes that cloud computing will soon become obsolete and “storm computing” will be the next big thing.
  • A posting on Google News says that the world’s oldest Christian Bible, a 1,600-year-old manuscript, has been digitized and is now available online.
  • An interesting website called The Know Something Project provides some great information and a good overview of the e-book environment.
  • A posting on the Kindle Review blog provides some interesting thoughts about Google’s plan to defeat the Kindle. The posting notes, “Google cares far more that the Kindle doesn’t succeed than it does about its own success in books.”
  • Two new e-readers were introduced this week: the Ditto Book and Cybook Opus. The Ditto Book is a 6-inch non-wireless device that includes: black & white e-ink screen, long battery life, ability to read text and PDF, support for ePub, and expandable SD card slot for an additional 2 GB of storage. The Cybook Opus is a 5-inch device that includes: black & white e-ink screen, support for ePub and PDF files, and has 1 GB of internal storage with an SD card slot for additional storage.
  • An article from Wired takes a look at the bookstores that are creating their own e-readers.
  • David Carr from The New York Times wrote an interesting article after he visited Google to meet with chief executive, Eric Schmidt and founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
  • An article from CNET says that some hotels are beginning to offer their guests e-readers for use during their stay. A second article from Teleread questions if the hotels that offer Kindles have received consent from Amazon. It was recently reported that the BYU library discontinued their Kindle loaning program because Amazon has not responded to their request for written consent.