Borders forced to liquidate, close all stores — from the WSJ by Mike Spector and Jeff Trachtenberg
Also see:
From DSC:
Another example — like Blockbuster — of a company who underestimated the disruptive power of technology.
Digital Book 2011 – presentation slides now available — from International Digital Publishing Forum (idpf.org)
Presentation slides from IDPF Digital Book 2011 at BEA (May 23-24 2011) can be downloaded from links in each speaker’s biography.
Also see:
Publishers launch first digital-only textbook for K-12 — from Mashable.com by Sarah Kessler
Excerpt:
McGraw-Hill launched its first all-digital, cloud-based textbook for the K-12 market on Monday at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference.
Unlike the company’s previous digital efforts for this age group, the books are intended to be used as primary texts (other McGraw-Hill digital texts have been sold as a companion of physical textbooks). This is the first time a major publisher has launched such a platform.
Apple adds Read Aloud capability to iBooks 1.3 — from pigsgourdsandwikis.com by Liz Castro
Excerpt:
One of the very interesting new features that Apple has added to iBooks 1.3 is support for Media Overlays as specified in the EPUB3 spec. According to Lawrence Furnival, it works with Fixed Layout EPUBs using SMIL files that link the audio to the text, using a timeline and CSS to highlight particular words as they are spoken. It’s pretty exciting.
From DSC:
One of the first books I picked up years ago — re: HTML at the time — was from Elizabeth Castro. I learned a ton from her. Thanks Liz!
Also, I was excited to find her blog as I would like to see our Teaching & Learning Digital Studio come alongside faculty members to help them create their own “digital textbooks”.
