McGraw-Hill made news by launching the first ever digital-only, cloud-based K-12 math and science textbooks. That distinction should be made, since most interesting digital textbook offerings thus far have come at the higher education level — which makes sense, after all — and/or are supplemental to their print-based counterparts. So could this digital-only approach be a sign of things to come in the world of textbooks?

You can find out more details at the CINCH Learning website.

Upon closer perusal, this actually strikes me as more of a learning management system, than just a digital textbook — and this in itself is an interesting question: will the distinction between digital textbook content become less clear as more online functionality becomes part of the evolving textbook technology? In the meantime, the hardware question is still one of, if not the biggest, question about digital questions in the classroom.

There was much ado about schools quickly moving to adopt the iPad into their classrooms when it was first released (those lucky kids). Perhaps even more surprising that iPads were finding their way into preschools and kindergarten classrooms as well (Chicago Tribune: “Finger paints, picture books and iPads — the newest classroom tools for some preschools, kindergartens“). And for a measured perspective, which brings up the very good and practical arguments about price and available educational content for the iPad, see also — Gizmodo: “Why iPads Aren’t Ready for Classrooms … Yet.”

On that topic, The New York Times (“Digital Textbooks Slow to Catch On”) earlier just this month noted digital textbooks still have much room for growth before they really become mainstream. According to one study: “e-textbooks made up only 2.8 percent of total U.S. textbook sales in 2010.” The article’s worth a read to see some of the things online textbook companies such as CourseSmart, Inkling, Kno, and Flat World Knowledge are up to. Tablets open up new legitimate possibilites for the learning experience – how those possibilities are played out is anyone’s guess, really. For me, and speaking from the educator’s perspective, thinking about how students use their textbooks now (not necessarily what else they could be doing with digital textbooks) is still the primary objective. That means the note-taking and highlighting types of things which students do to interact with the text in a book; and then, the value-added rich media content that further enhances the textbook experience becomes even more compelling. Flat PDFs of printed textbooks are still kinda/sorta useful as supplements, but those are inevitably going to be today’s version of that not-terribly-useful CD-ROM that was packaged with old textbooks, if they’re not there already: “In this industry, print has been the premium experience. In our model, it’s the degraded experience, and this means we’ll have an easier time translating into the tablet market.” (In fact, this gives me an idea for a future post on the different kinds of learning styles that word vs. image-based content might impact. Hmm).

So, the shape of things to come with digital textbooks depends somewhat on your worldview. If you’re a the-glass-is-half-empty kind of person, digital textbooks have a lot of catching up to do. If you’re a the-glass-is-half-full kind of person, there’s going to be a lot of interesting developments and experimentation ongoing — anything that enhances the learning experience is going to be worth keeping an eye on.

There really aren’t that many good or interesting literature apps out there. So, the good news is that Penguin Classics just debuted their app, and it’s pretty good.

Some contributing thoughts (courtesy of Fast Company, “Penguin Classics App Shakes Up Book Browsing With A Pub Quiz For Lit Lovers“), suggest that this could be ”doing for iPhone book browsing what Urbanspoon did for restaurant searching“ (kind of a weird analogy, but I suppose I get it). The UrbanSpoon comparison fits well enough: shaking your iPhone lets you chance upon a randomly selected book title. The shaking thing never truly appealed to me — it seems less of a normal browsing action, and more of a reaction, when one is trying to compel intractable technology to work properly. Maybe that’s just me, however.

The Good: You can find every Penguin Classic spanning over 1,500 titles; some reading tracking features (bookmark interesting looking books, Books I’ve Read, Books I Want to Read); The Essential Classics recommendations are great; and The Penguin Classics Quiz is the most fun part — One Minute Lightning Round, Five Minute, and Ten Minute Play.

The Not So Good:  The only gripe I had was that the Discover the Classics and More Like This features had some issues and worked less-than-smoothly the few times I’ve tried it out thus far.

Also of Note: As Fast Company points out, you can only purchase print-editions of the Penguin Classics through the app, instead of ebooks as you might expect:

“E-rights are thorny with some classics, but Penguin doesn’t rule out the possibility of an e-book store in the future. For now, the app makes it less of a tool for a book-lovers’ immediate gratification, more a tool to carry with you to your local shop. Who knows, maybe it’ll lead to more purchases of actual books.”

Verdict: All in all, it’s a good-looking app, with some genuinely compelling features. Couple of bugs, and some aspects of the navigation could be better, but it’s the first release, so I’m optimistic it’ll get better as it goes. It’s not a bad start at all.

And here’s a link to where you can find it at the App Store. It’s free, so worth checking out.

Here’s a new one, that I never would have heard of if I hadn’t happened to see this Mashable article (“What Do You Love: Google’s Ultimate Mashup“):

“Google has launched a new, mysterious service called What Do You Love. It’s a simple search box, similar to the one on Google’s homepage, but it returns results from more than 20 different Google services, including Google Translate, Trends, YouTube, Maps and Groups.“

Mysterious indeed. At first glance, it does appear to be a way to do a sort of meta-Google search on twenty things at the same time. For broad information-gathering tasks, I could see this being something — maybe I want to do a super Google search, and see all book-related search results on Google, Google News, Google Scholar, and Google Blog Search at the same time.

Check it out at: www.wdyl.com or google.com/whatdoyoulove

Continuing on from yesterday’s thoughts on the green debate of ebooks and books, here’s some additional, interesting thoughts from Slate, “Should you ditch your books for an e-reader?”

Be sure to take a look at the infographic at the left (click on the image for the full-sized version). Lots of information on how ebooks could be good for the environment (i.e., save trees, save energy, reduce paper consumption, etc.), complete with user-friendly images.

If for nothing else, I’m fascinated in the Greenness of eBooks Question because it’s good for perspective on the environmental impact of the book printing industry in general.

Based upon the infographic (courtesy of WellHome.com), ebooks saved over 1.2 million trees by reducing the amount of paper needed. When you think about the more disposable kind of books (you know, any of those kinds of genre fictions that are read-once-and-never-again paperbacks), that’s a lot of trees.

Reasons to make the ebook switch include:

• Save trees
• Save energy
• Reduce consumption of paper
• Reduce energy, costs of recycling paper books
• Reduce packaging and other material costs from physical books
• Save fuel from physical book transportation
• Save up to $10 billion per year, if all books sold in the U.S. were ebooks (probably the most debatable point, but still)

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Anyways, from the Slate article:

“There will be no Sophie’s choice when it comes to e-books. As long as you consume a healthy number of titles, you read at a normal pace, and you don’t trade in your gadget every year, perusing electronically will lighten your environmental impact.”

It probably sounds like common sense — but that’s never something to take for granted, after all — the argument is that the more reusable a product is, the better off, in the long run. Thus, in theory, if an e-reader is kept long enough to accumulate enough use-value to replace those paper-existence books, then it is a greener way to go:

“Think of an e-reader as the cloth diaper of books … every time you download and read an electronic book, rather than purchasing a new pile of paper, you’re paying back a little bit of the carbon dioxide and water deficit. The actual operation of an e-reader represents a small percentage of its total environmental impact, so if you run your device into the ground, you’ll end up paying back that debt many times over.”

And whenever we’re talking about environmental impact, it’s always eventually going to come down to a question of this, versus that. Is the Green eBook Question about saving paper? reducing toxic materials produced? Co2 emissions? To that last point, an interesting bit on the relative greenness of the iPad vs. the Kindle: ”the iPad pays for its CO₂ emissions about one third-of the way through your 18^th book. You’d need to get halfway into your 23^rd book on Kindle to get out of the environmental red.”

I think it’s safe to say that some of the math involved in both this article and The New York Times (“How Green is My iPad?“) are probably open for debate. Actually, it’s really all still open for debate.

The New York Times (“How Green is My iPad?“) got me thinking about a new topic – the ebooks Green Debate: “which is more environmentally friendly: an e-reader or an old-fashioned book?” Conventional thinking goes something like this: books have a cost in trees (one estimate pegs it around 30 million trees used in the U.S. per year, for book-making) ebooks are paperless, and therefore are a greener option.

It’s not quite as simple as paper vs. paperless books (nothing’s ever really that simple, you know). The Times takes weighs a number of factors: the materials needed to produce an e-reading device; energy consumption of running said device, and the ultimate environmental impact of its disposal. The ebook Green Debate also means thinking about the tradeoffs of the pollution generated from, say, buying your book on Amazon, having it delivered by a big brown UPS vans to your front door (“If you order a book online and have it shipped 500 miles by air, that creates roughly the same pollution and waste as making the book in the first place“); or the energy impact of reading a book by nightstand lamp vs. charging your Kindle (“If you like to read a book in bed at night for an hour or two, the light bulb will use more energy than it takes to charge an e-reader, which has a highly energy-efficient screen“).

Granted that there is some informed speculation involved, but here’s this:

“The adverse health impacts from making one e-reader are estimated to be 70 times greater than those from making a single book.

And the big question:

So, how many volumes do you need to read on your e-reader to break even? With respect to fossil fuels, water use and mineral consumption, the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly 40 to 50 books. When it comes to global warming, though, it’s 100 books; with human health consequences, it’s somewhere in between.”

40-50 books for the environmental impact of one e-reader actually seems well within the realm of possibility for a person who consumes a couple of dozen books a year, and is planning to keep their device a reasonable amount of time. There seems to be a good amount of debate about the exact number of ebooks that constitute the break-even point (see the infographic above, courtesy of GOOD, which in this case compares the carbon impact of ebooks vs. books). Interesting stuff.

Check out Eco-Libris for a ton more links on the Green Debate of ebooks vs. books.

Particularly interesting is this one: “Which e-reader is the greenest one – Kobo, Sony, Nook or the Kindle?” It’s far from complete based on the little information still available on the environmental impact on e-readers. But, for what it’s worth, Amazon’s Kindle seems to have the slight edge towards being the most eco-friendly e-reader.

Of course, the most eco-friendly reading option of them all is still to walk (or bike) to your local library.

To continue from yesterday’s thoughts on ebook design, here’s the Los Angeles Times (“Making books do things e-books can’t — and vice versa“), suggesting that the evolution of the ebook form could also spur a counter-evolution of the printed book form.

It’s funny how much attention gets paid to the e-reading device as an object of interest (at least, I know I spend way too much time looking at reviews of the newest Nook, or Kindle, or whatever). The L.A. Times article is somewhat of a refreshing change since it gives us a chance to consider the book — the printed book — as an object. I’ll admit, I’m not particularly interested in buying the sort of artfully designed books they describe, but the reflections on these books as objects of craftsmanship are interesting: “… physicality is part of their function; they are meant to be held as well as read.” Not that any of this implies the second coming of the William Morris* school of book design (no, not that William Morris), but the historical parallels are worth thinking about.

In the 19th century, there was a small, yet significant movement that looked backwards to what books had been, a sort of counter-movement to the increasing market of mass-produced books that made available cheaper and cheaper books (meaning, both less expensive, and less good). In other words, Old was the new New.

The sentiment I appreciated the most, in thinking about both the craft of book-making, as well as the way books are consumed: “There’s a benefit to slowness.” There really is. The lure of technology is that we can get what we want faster, smaller, cheaper (sometimes) … but I think we’d all agree that more efficient reading isn’t always better reading.

And what an interesting question:

“Are we writing books or producing content that can be reproduced in any form?” asked Ander Monson, a poet and essayist.

I wonder a lot about the answer to that very question. Is the line between book/content becoming less distinguishable?

For me, I always think of a book like House of Leaves. It’s the sort of unusual reading experience that’s hard to describe, because of its disorienting weirdness. As an enhanced ebook, it could seriously be awesome. As a straight conversion from its printed form to an ePub or Kindle edition, it just wouldn’t work; it couldn’t work.

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* For book history fans, check out this online collection from the University of Glasgow featuring William Morris and his Kelmscott Press:

“He set out to prove that the high standards of the past could be repeated – even surpassed – in the present … Noteworthy for their harmony of type and illustration, Morris’ main priority was to have each book seen as a whole: this included taking painstaking care with all aspects of production, incuding the paper, the form of type, the spacing of the letters, and the position of the printed matter on the page. Kelmscott books re-awakened the ideals of book design and inspired better standards of production at a time when the printed page was generally at its poorest.”

Now granted that there is something to be said about the whole beauty being in the eye of the beholder thing, but Wired takes up a question (“Why E-Books Look So Ugly“) that any of us who have ever read an ebook have thought about, at least in passing.

Almost all of the discussion of ebook readability is hardware-centric – more often than not focusing on screen resolution, or glare, etc. of the ereading device which we happen to be reading on. But in terms of the actual words we read, ebooks still look rather blah, for lack of a better adjective (actually ‘blah,’ pretty much does cover it).  From Wired:

“’There’s a dearth of typographic expression in e-books today,’ says Pablo Defendini, digital producer for Tor.com.”

Gosh, there is an awful lot to say on the topic of typography. But for now, we’ll focus on an interesting analogy that comes up in that same Wired article, describing what contributes to the personality of a book:

“Different typefaces are like having different actors in [a] play … The variations in typeface influence the personality of the book. Sticking to one font is much like having the same actor play all the different parts.”

So what? Whether or not the specific issue of typography carries any emotional valence for you or me, there’s something extremely important in this — it reminds us, as much as we think of written and visual communication as separate things, there is an undeniable visual element to words on a page that might simply go unnoticed during our experience of reading. Unnoticed, that is, until it’s no longer there. The elements of a text – style, format, design — are part of that form of expression which makes a book what it is.

Or, maybe it’s simply a matter of personal preference. Maybe we should be thinking about what it is that we truly want in the reading experience: is it consistency and sameness? Or is it variation, uniqueness, personality? When reading our ebooks on a Kindle or an iPad, some of those bookish elements — book covers are probably what I miss most — are inevitably lost. We move from handling the thingness of a bound, printed book to manipulating whichever e-reading device we happen to be using. With printed books, we feel the difference between a cheap mass-market paperback edition, or the solidity of a library edition hardcover — different from the hardware of an e-reading device, which is always feels the same.

It’s somewhat telling that a Wired article from a couple of years ago is still quite relevant today. Of course, the chances are pretty darn good that ebooks are not going to stay ugly forever. We might be seeing glimpses, based on some of the interesting things that enhanced ebooks are showing us, of what’s possible for the evolution of ebooks.

One of the things that makes Inception such a compelling, fascinating movie-going experience is that it plays upon the boundaries of the possible and the impossible. Malleable physics and gravity-bending dreamscapes. Impossible architecture and strange loops. There’s plenty of opportunity for reflection on a number of weighty philosophical topics, which makes Inception one of the rare movies that rewards re-watching.

The question of paradox in Inception is a very interesting one. “In a dream you can cheat architecture into impossible shapes. That lets you create closed loops. Like the Penrose Steps. An infinite staircase,” Arthur says to Ariadne, as they discuss dream architecture.

“See? Paradox.”

You might recognize the Penrose Steps from M.C. Escher’s well-known print, Ascending and Descending. The Penrose Steps are a matter of perspective. Looked at from a certain perspective, the stairs seem to go up or down, infinitely in a never-ending loop. But in this scene, looked at from a different perspective by Arthur and Ariadne, they seem to abruptly terminate into nothing. The visual paradox lies in this illusion created by this seemingly-impossible architectural structure.

So, what are paradoxes exactly? Are they really possible? What do paradoxes mean in Inception? And what can we learn by thinking about them? These are some of the things covered in Inception and Philosophy is set to hit bookshelves in November. Check out more information at the Blackwell Philosophy and Popular Culture website: andphilosophy.com

Check out this history of ebooks timeline (1971-2011), courtesy of ebookfriendly.com. (Full image provided below). We don’t often give much thought to ebooks having a history spanning 40 years — but it sure is interesting for a sense of perspective on the evolution of ebook technology. Also useful for trivia purposes – what was the very first ebook ever? That distinction belongs to Project Gutenberg’s digitization of The Declaration of Independence.

Jurassic Park, the Expanded Books version

And for even more of a history lesson, you’ll want to take a look at “Three Ebook Technologies That Failed, and Hard.” There’s something intriguing to me in general about looking back at things which, at the time, may have seemed like The Next Big Thing, but end up being nothing more than footnotes on a ‘List of Things That Sucked.’ The three ebook technologies in question: Voyager Company‘s CD-ROM Expanded Books (1992); the Rocket eBook and SoftBook (1998), and the Sony LIBRIé (2004).

How far has the ebook tech come, from a hardware point of view? The specs on the early ancestors of the Kindle and Nook:

“The $349 Rocket had a liquid crystal display, the green kind you see on a calculator, weighed 1 pound 6 ounces, and boasted a whole 4 MB of disk space – “the equivalent of 10 novels!” Its pricier competitor the SoftBook, which sold for $599.95 (!), had 2 MB, and weighed a whopping 2.9 pounds. But it came with a built-in 33.6 Kbps modem which could “download approximately 100 pages per minute.”

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Since I decided to revisit Steven Johnson’s thoughts on the future of news, it would be remiss of me to not also say something about Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” which also happened to appear around March of 2009. ”Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” generated a great deal of conversation at the time — and it’s easy to see why. Clay raised a number of important and interesting questions about the future of newspapers, publishing, and journalism; none of which have clear or obvious solutions.

Settling upon solutions to those questions is difficult, because it requires that we look back upon the history of what has been, while looking forward into the future of what might be. In other words, while we have very good reasons to believe that we see history in the making in the Digital Age, the honest answer is still, who the heck really knows? We draw upon similar-seeming examples from the past, make inferences, and do our best to forecast into the future, but like Hegel would have us believe: “The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history.”

For example: Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Eisenstein’s scholarly work focuses on the Print Revolution, and the deep and far-reaching changes wrought upon society by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. We can see what life was like before this period, and what life was like after. The true challenge, it turns out, is in discerning that historical change, as it is happening:  ”During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.”

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In a tangentially-related sort of way, simpsonscrazy.com has an excellent collection of Simpsons newspaper headlines.