App Development

Kobo quietly rolled out a new update last week for their Android app, and it's one worth our attention. In addition to the usual bug fixes and other improvements, the new app boasts support for Epubs with embedded audio, faster loading of Epub files, and new stability improvements for fixed layout Epub ebooks.

According to the changelog, the app also now has an immersive reading mode which many other reading apps have added over the past year.

For an entire school year Hillsborough, New Jersey, educators undertook an experiment, asking: Is the iPad really the best device for interactive learning?

It's a question that has been on many minds since 2010, when Apple released the iPad and schools began experimenting with it. The devices came along at a time when many school reformers were advocating to replace textbooks with online curricula and add creative apps to lessons. Some teachers welcomed the shift, which allowed their students to replace old poster-board presentations with narrated screencasts

Publishers are adopting crowdsourcing platforms in order to empower readers and authors without losing them to pure self-publishing platforms.

Academia.edu is a key player in the movement toward open access scientific publishing, with over 11 million participants who have uploaded nearly 3 million scientific papers to the site. It's easy to understand Price's frustration with the current model, in which academics donate their time to review articles, pay for the right to publish articles, and pay for access to articles. According to Price, journals charge an average of $4000 per article: $1500 for production costs (reformatting, designing), $1500 to orchestrate peer review

Wattpad, an online writing and reading community, has acquired the Red Room, an online community originally described as a "Facebook for authors." The Red Room site will be subsumed into Wattpad and go offline beginning July 8.

Former Red Room authors are invited to create new accounts at Wattpad. A spokesperson for Wattpad said former Red Room authors will "have to create a Wattpad account and migrate their stories over themselves." She said that Wattpad has a "dedicated team member on our Community Team who is helping Red Roomers with this transition."

On Christmas Eve Day in 2012, I sat in a Starbucks and wrote an enthusiastic post about why it had been the year of the e-single. E-singles - works of journalism between 3,000 to 15,000 words, usually nonfiction and sold as individual ebooks - were "a true digital-native format," I wrote, "the format for our time," ideal to read curled up with your iPad. With the crash and burn of Byliner this year, however, my enthusiasm seems less than prescient. Byliner, which launched in 2011, was one of the darlings of the literary startup scene

Starting with courses for nursing and health professions students, Elsevier will use Knewton's infrastructure to power personalized digital solutions that continuously adjust to each individual's unique learning needs. "Today, the demand for health and medical professionals around the world is growing rapidly, and higher education institutions need the best materials to help students prepare for careers in the health industry," John Danaher, President, Elsevier Education, said in a statement. "Our Knewton-powered solutions will help transform health science education for professors and students, inside and outside the classroom.

TORONTO, CANADA - June 10, 2014 - Audiobooks.com, the only service that allows members to both stream and download audiobooks, today announced that they are releasing a new Romance Audiobooks, Novels and Stories app for iOS devices. Audiobooks.com extends the Romance Audiobooks app as a first attempt at targeting a niche market based on genre…

The global education company Pearson has landed a major contract to administer tests aligned to the common-core standards, a project described as being of "unprecedented scale" in the U.S. testing arena by one official who helped negotiate it.

The decision to award the contract, announced Friday, was made by a group of states developing tests linked to the common core for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, one of two main consortia of states creating exams to match the standards.

Hachette UK has formed a new partnership with @RailBookClub to help it engage with readers.

@RailBookClub, advertising company JCDecaux's content-led consumer book club, invites passengers to tweet book recommendations, which are then run on JCDecaux's digital screens at train stations across the country.

The book club "builds communities of readers through a shared passion for books, providing a daily source of inspiration for the rail audience".