Follett, a distributor of educational materials, has announced that it has developed an eBook reader for education that is aimed at classrooms and libraries. Now, don’t be mistaken. This isn’t a portable eBook reader. It’s a software reader that is paired with its own online store. They claim that this reader should protect publisher content while introducing new “education-friendly” technology. It may not be exciting but it’s probably good news for schools that can’t afford 500 units of this or that kind of hardware.
Here is the rundown on features:
- A selection of eBook Library views (thumbnails and cover flow) for browsing your downloaded eBook collection
- Two different page views (single and facing)
- Search tools, including “find text” and “find next” functionality
- Publisher pre-defined copy/paste and print capabilities
- Zoom in/out function to customize your views (by percentage, fit to page, height and width)
- Pre-defined bookmarks to jump to relevant content when set by the publisher
- Note-taking tools with highlighting
The new Follett Digital Reader system will be replacing their previous Adobe PDF eBooks in March 2nd of this year. Hopefully this will save our schools a little money and a lot of paper.
I wonder what they were thinking about when they decided to start this as a project internally… do people really want to sit at a computer to read their textbooks to begin with? I find that people like the Kindle partly because you can take it anywhere. Laptops don’t replace it either, and I could be wrong, but people want single function devices like the Kindle. When you turn on a computer, you have to wait for things to load, you have to wait for a wifi connection to use the internet, deal with any problems, etc. whereas on a Kindle, it will just work.
Follett’s is probably just trying to do whatever it can to protect its own turf as paper textbooks are phased out in the future, but just making a computer program won’t cut it.