e-Reading

Have you read a book "for pleasure" on a digital device?

See this informal poll 18 Sept of librarians and 17 Oct -- created using Wallwisher

Wes Fryer (Moving at the Speed of Creativity) has blogged about e-books, e.g.,

- Branding, Advertising, and the Attention Economy - where he talks about reading Naomi Klein's No Logo in ebook format;
- Thanks Project Gutenberg for underwriting our 6th grade summer reading list - re finding his son's reading list in ebook format
- Convert PDF Files into E-Books - a very practical post

Tools for sharing reading reflections

a social bookmarking tool that lets you highlight and annotate your reading. You have to register, but it's free. When you are logged in, you have the option of seeing any annotations (highlighting, sticky notes, and/or floating notes) on the page made just by you and/or people in Diigo groups you belong to and/or anyone in the world.

For example, this article

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com by Steven Johnson (20Apr09)

has been heavily annotated by various people. Here is a list of the annotations which anyone can see.

If, however, you are logged into Diigo and have opted to see all annotations, you will see the article and annotations -- like this:

In Diigo, you can also set up groups. We set one up for this project as a place to keep collecting links to articles related to digital content and learning. Please feel free to join it.

Diigo also has Educator Accounts -- which allow you to set up student accounts. I recently set up one for Grade 5 students who are studying rainforests and biomes -- called uwcgrade5. It allows the grade 5 teachers to follow exactly what websites students are bookmarking and what they are highlighting on those websites -- and what they are thinking about what they are highlighting.

William Ferriter, a 6th grade teacher, has a good introduction to social bookmarking and Diigo where he outlines student roles for social annotation of articles, similar to literature circle roles. See his wiki Digitally Speaking.

Adobe Digital Editions is a free online tool that allows you to read PDFs online and annotate them.

For example, Bound by Law is a copyright-free comic book about copyright.

“Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic's heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean 'Rights Monster' - all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.” -Brandt Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal online

It can be read online in a Flash animated version (where the pages visually turn) or downloaded in HTML or as a PDF file. Here is a screenshot of the Flash animated reader:

This is how the PDF version looks when loaded into Adobe Digital Editions.

and you can add Notes, just like in Diigo.

e-Reading

Have you read a book "for pleasure" on a digital device?

Tools for sharing reading reflections

More Online Reading Applications

Example from the Library of Congress