Zac Bedell’s BookShelf for the iPhone and iPod Touch should be of special interest to educators—given the ease with which students and teachers will be able to share libraries of books.
I’m pleased to see eSchools News mentioning it in a roundup on K-12 apps and noting the autoscroll feature. Just the ticket for straphangers, perhaps?
Educators should also check out the Stanza e-reading app, because it’s so easy to download oodles of free classics from Feedbooks.
At least 16 of the 500+ apps in the iPhone App store are for schools.
The audiobook-PDF connection
Speaking of the iPhone/Touch for K-12, remember the potential for audiobooks. Mary Burkey, a school librarian, has written on the Kindle as a way to enjoy books in both audio and text—and perhaps simultaneously read the same words that you hear. She points to Tantor Audio‘s unabridged classics series, which includes audios and PDFs.
And guess what? The iPhone can handle PDF just like the Kindle. Tantor offers both audio CDs and MP3 CDs, so I’m assuming it wouldn’t be that big a hassle to transfer the books to the iPhone via iTunes (no mention of DRM).
One big K-12 advantage of the iPhone over the Kindle: Kids love color screens. The K machine’s E Ink screen is essentially just black against a kinda-white background. But then again, the K screen is much larger, so maybe it’s a wash.
