Microsoft Corp.

David Langridge is Microsoft’s Worldwide Education Senior Partner Development Director, Worldwide Microsoft Education Industry Group. Publishing Perspectives caught up with him to hear his thoughts on the future of edtech. One of the big issues in edtech is the continued popularity of printed textbooks. Why do you think this is the case? They are popular…

In the middle of yet another disappointing earnings report Thursday, Barnes & Noble announced that it's terminating the strategic partnership it formed with Microsoft in 2012. That partnership had combined Barnes & Noble's Nook and college businesses into a division called Nook Media, into which Microsoft invested $300 million. According to the company:

Such termination will allow the Company to continue its rationalization of the NOOK Digital business and enhances Barnes & Noble's operational and strategic flexibility.  The termination also relieves Microsoft of any obligation to continue to fund support and other payments

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

Hold the phone: Amazon wants to burrow even deeper into your life.

The retailer is expected to introduce a smartphone on Wednesday at an event in Seattle, a long-rumored project that aims to close any remaining gap between the impulse to buy and the completed act.

Amazon has spent the last several years furiously investing billions of dollars on multiple fronts: constructing warehouses all over the country to deliver goods as fast as possible, building devices as varied as tablets and set-top boxes, and creating and licensing entertainment to stock those devices.

Barnes & Noble, the bookseller that has struggled to establish itself in the tablet market, is calling on Samsung for some help.

The companies announced Thursday that they will launch co-branded tablets with a mouthful of a name:Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook. The devices will feature Samsung's hardware and customized Nook software from Barnes & Noble. The first Galaxy Tab 4 Nook, sporting a 7-inch display, will hit US store shelves in August.

At the age of 50, Park established his company Gitden in a rundown office in the Sadang neighborhood of Seoul and produced the Gitden Reader after two years during which he barely left his desk. The application has shoved aside products by Apple, Google, and Amazon to gain recognition for its world-class quality.

The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which maintains the electronic publication (EPUB) standard for e-books, published on May 12 the results of its assessment of the compatibility of e-book readers on app stores to the EPUB 3.0 standards.

In response to a recent opinion piece posted on Rocklin & Roseville Today titled "Barnes & Noble: Gone By New Year's?", Barnes & Noble Chief Executive Officer, Michael P. Huseby, contacted our office to respond. Here is his complete, unedited response.

Amazon.com's sales were up 23% in its first quarter of 2014, but it seemed to be profits that its stockholders were looking for this time around. Shareholders had previously been able to ignore the fact that they were paying a premium for a stock in a company that had skimpy or no profits at all. Instead, they could point to the healthy rate of growth that Amazon kept displaying. But profitability seemed to rear its head in the stock market's reaction to this year's first quarter. Amazon's shares were down nearly 10%

Although it hasn’t happened yet, it’s clearly only a matter of time before Microsoft officially unboxes a smaller form-factor version of its Surface tablet. A Surface Mini has been rumoured for well over a year – with both 7- and 8-inch options apparently being considered to augment the company’s existing line up of Windows powered tablets with the Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2.

In Invasion of the Space Invaders, Martin Amis's 1982 treatise on the emergent video game medium, the British author wrote: "The video game tells a story. The better you get, the longer the story lasts. And we all know how children feel about stories." In the early 1980s, video-game stories were laughably straightforward: the aliens die in Space Invaders, the dots are eaten in Pac-Man, the ball is batted in Pong.