E-Book Reader Progress

"Plastic Logic demonstrates e-reader"
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210600214

By creating transistors on a plastic surface they can be made less expensively, helping drive the price of the display down.

Prediction Diagram

Seems we are supposed to provide some form of visuals regarding our predictions. I though a fishbone diagram of the factors currently inhibiting the use of electronic textbooks might be useful. Being too lazy to try to draw such a diagram in Word, I downloaded a demo copy of SmartDraw (www.smartdraw.com) which makes drawing the diagrams easy. Here is my diagram (click on it for a larger view):

Social aspects of Web 2.0 - troublemakers

So you have a troublemaker on your forum. They're rude and offensive, and you've warned them to clean up their act but they don't. You'd like to ban them, but they love an audience, and so they would be right back under a different user name. What to do? Use the "bozo" feature. Some forum software is starting to include a bozo feature. This feature is similar to automatically blocking the bozo for all other users. The bozo still sees their posts, but no one else does. The bozo doesn't get the attention they seek, and eventually leave. There's an article here:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/09/01/the-bozo-feature
The discussion about the article is interesting also.

A longer term solution is "Saving the internet with hate":
http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/

Web 2.0 - "posting aggregation"

So you blog, tweet, put photos on flickr, bookmark on delicious, and so on, and you expect your friends to subscribe to blogger, twitter, flickr, and so on to see what your doing?

Do them a favor.

friendfeed.com and sweetcron.com will aggregate all of your sources for your friends.

Here's mine:
http://friendfeed.com/davecs855

My Prediction

Following the education trend of other classmate's predictions, here is mine:

Prediction: In 15 years students will have electronic textbooks (which includes a reader)

Factors leading to my prediction:

Mandated material is adding to the amount of content in textbooks, making books bigger.
More graphics are making books bigger.
Bigger books are more expensive to produce and are harder to carry.
Carrying books is necessary because lockers are being eliminated.
States are starting to legislate the maximum weight a student can be required to carry (laws already exist in Georgia and California).
One electronic device that contains all of the material in the textbooks resolves the weight problem.

Electronic textbooks can easily contain graphics, and even richer content such as audio and movies.

The life of a textbook is six or more years.

Textbooks are becoming more "web enabled". Web links in the textbooks lead to rich content on the web, such as animations, audio, and video, that can't be printed.

Electronic textbooks need a way to read them.
Although not as flexible, a dedicated device has the potential to be less expensive than a general purpose computer (such as one laptop per child).
e-book readers are relatively new. The Sony Librié was introduced in 2004.

e-book readers are still expensive. An Amazon Kindle is $359. A Sony Librié is $299.
The population is aging. Older people with grown children are less likely to approve school bond measures and tax increases. Education is already short on cash, and unfounded government mandates, such as no child left behind, means schools will not have ample funding for the foreseeable future (beyond 15 years).
Lack of budget means that there needs to be more price parity between printed and electronic books.

New display technologies are pushing costs down. OLED displays, and electronic ink displays such as Liquavista, show promise for low cost and low power consumption.

Electronic forms of books allow for many disabled students to have access to material through large type or text to speech.

Putting it all together:

There's a lot of reasons to move to electronic textbooks.

Hardware for electronic books is in its infancy, and volume is low, so costs are high.

When the current books are replaced (zero to 6+ years), schools still won't be quite ready to invest, causing them to delay for another book cycle.

Current web augmented books will provide an intermediate step. When the time i ready, publishers will already have content ready to go.

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Liquavista: http://www.liquavista.com/
Association of American Publishers - School Division: http://www.aapschool.org/vp_size.html
Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FI73MA/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=1746548141&ref=pd_sl_4usif68krl_e
Sony: http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=8198552921644523780
Accessibility: http://www.icdri.org/electronic_textbooks.htm