A Call for Fair eBook Pricing- Site-Based Pricing Has Small Schools Over-Charged (The Digital Shift)

Barnes & Noble Launches Nook for Android and iOS in UK
(Digital Book World)

McGraw-Hill Sells Off Education Unit for 2.5B (GigaOM)

Bookboard Beta Introduces 300 Children’s Titles (Good E-Reader)

Kindle Daily Deal: Promise Not to Tell by Jennifer McMahon & A Dragon Moves In by Lisa Falkenstern

 

2 COMMENTS

  1. Regarding the piece that calls for fair K-12 eBook pricing, it is amazing that so many regard the textbook as something that only a publishing house is legally allowed to make and sell. Pick a textbook, any K-12 textbook, and go through it with an eye toward determining what proportion of it is copyrightable. You cannot copyright facts and ideas only the unique expression of an idea. Teachers are expected to already be conversant with those facts and ideas so what’s to stop them in this digital era from “rolling their own?” If I were a school system superintendent, I’d be soliciting proposals from classroom teachers who were willing to use the digital tools available to us today to create textbooks in exchange for released time, summer employment and other supports. Expecting people who are in business to maximize profits to be fair is extremely unrealistic.

  2. Hi Frank, thanks for your comment! Many of us do, in fact, make and share our own resources. I teach a curriculum that is excellent, but really hits the sweet spot, effectiveness-wise, at about the Grade 2 level. For my younger classes, I have found it is as much work to adapt existing materials as it is to just make them from scratch, so I have done so—and shared them on a message board for other teachers using this program. In my experience both in my own country and overseas, the reliance on official textbooks is very much an American thing. I know American teachers who have worried they can’t teach certain content because a textbook insert was missing, for instance. I know teachers elsewhere who would just shrug and find some other way to teach the content 🙂 In New Zealand, when I was there, they didn’t use textbooks at all.

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