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Publishers Short-Sighted in E-Book Price Fight
Another episode of As The E-Book Turns wrapped this week, with Amazon locked in a page-turning battle with the publishing industry. The plot twists are many, but here’s a quick outline: Amazon wants to continue charging $10 for e-book versions of most new titles and bestsellers, but the industry’s leading publishers think that price is too low.
By Jeff Bertolucci
Read PC World
Five Reasons Why the iPad Won’t Change Higher Education
Before the iPad, publishers hadn’t much incentive to produce digital textbooks on portable devices. Think about scrolling through your chemistry tome on a Kindle, making clunky annotations on a bland black-and-white screen — it just isn’t as conducive to learning as four-color images and the ability to doodle in the margins. So when software developer ScrollMotion was tapped to create iPad-friendly versions of textbooks, surely students, educators and publishers uttered a collective cheer for the future of digital education. But is the iPad going to make a difference in the world of higher education? Here are five reasons why it won’t.
By Brennon Slattery
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University finds free online classes don’t hurt enrollment
Free online courses aren’t sapping enrollment numbers—in fact, they’re actually helping to spread the word. Those are the preliminary findings out of Brigham Young University, which experimented recently by granting free access to a selection of its distance learning courses. Though further study is needed in order to see whether there’s a significant impact, educators are beginning to see that offering free materials isn’t the end of the world after all.
By Jacqui Cheng
Read Ars Technica
A New View On TV
It didn’t take long after America started tuning in to television that people started to worry about what it was doing to children. “When it offers a daily diet of Western pictures and vaudeville by the hour, television often seems destined to entertain the child into a state of mental paralysis,” wrote The New York Times in 1949.
A generation later, the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of college-bound teenagers had fallen significantly. A 1977 panel appointed by the College Entrance Examination Board suggested television bore some blame for the drop. Indeed, the decline began in the mid-1960s, just as the first students heavily exposed to TV took their SATs.
By Justin Lahart
What Second Life can teach your datacenter about scaling Web apps
Over the past decade, building large-scale online applications has become a pretty well-understood science with numerous books, papers, periodicals, forums, and conferences devoted to the subject. The Web overflows with advice and prescriptions for achieving high reliability at massive scale.
By Ian Wilkes
Read Ars Technica