The e-Library is Open

Are physical books taking up too much space and squeezing out valuable teaching room? If your school is like most, there’re shelves, cabinets and closets stuffed with texts, not to mention the library. Larger districts have entire warehouses dedicated to books sitting around collecting dust. That space could be put to better uses by switching to their digital equivalent, the eBook. It’s not for all books, but for those schools in which students and teachers have access to notebooks, Follett Digital Resources can help digitize a school with eBook reader software.

Follett’s eBook Reader is a gem of a program that is available for PCs and Macs, but not for Linux computers. Rather than Adobe’s eBook format, HTML or any of the many other eBook formats in use today, Follett started from scratch with its own .fdr file type. Follett is in the midst of converting its 50,000 volumes into this format.

Once the book has been selected and downloaded, the Reader faithfully shows the book with sharp type and all illustrations. There’s a single or two-page view that mimics a real book. On the left is information on the book, including author, title and publisher.

At any time, you can zoom in or out, jump to another page, type in notes or search the text for a word or phrase. The teacher or students can add book marks to a text and highlight sections of interest. Schools can restrict how long the book is available to the reader and if the publisher permits it, pages or the entire work can be printed.

The Reader software is polished and lacks the rough edges of other first generation programs I’ve seen. Still, there are a few things it misses, such as the inability to include external links for the Web or a school server for enriching the material, like  multimedia content or a dictionary citation. For me, the hardest thing to swallow is that the Reader’ lacks a full screen view that does without any interface elements, which would help with schools that use netbooks with small screens.

Still, switching to eBooks can yield valuable extra instructional space while updating texts for the 21-st century. Plus, the price can’t be beat.

B+

Follett Digital Resources eBook Reader
Free

     +Text and illustrations show up faithfully
     + Zoom in and out
     + Single or two page view
     + Word search and notes

     - No external links to Web or school server
     - Yet another eBook file format
     - Can’t view full screen