jetBook Color at The O'Reilly Conference (TOC) Today in Manhattan

Today was an epic day with Ectaco attending The O'Reilly Conference (TOC) in Manhattan. A big thanks to Nate and Jon for making it happen with Greg and Boris being able to showcase the jetBook Color amongst 21 other eBook Readers.

The take away message we received was that the publishing industry is a bit confused as to what direction they should take. That's no surprise since printing hasn't changed much since Calvinism, besides being a little faster and more colorful. All in all, we are excited to witness and be in the midst of a movement that will change the publishing industry and have a positive effect on people around the world on how they read, write, and learn.

There were a few backlit tablets (which we believe everyone knows how we feel about those!! **insert thumbs down pic here**) and then the E Ink readers and finally our color E Ink jetBook Color.

Here are some pics from the show:

Boris and the jetBook Color (stationed right in the center of the room!)

Interest in the jetBook Color looms

the jetBook Color!!!!

Kickin' it old school - reader style

Even more old school reader gizmos

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Ectaco and AMSCO Publishing Team Up To Provide Students With eTextbooks

February 14, 2012 - New York, NY

One small step for schools, one giant leap for education.

AMSCO School Publications, Inc. and ECTACO, Inc. partner to finally bridge the gap between students and eTextbooks with the jetBook Color, the only color E Ink educational eBook system developed specifically for schools.

For over 70 years AMSCO has contributed to educating millions of people with their textbooks. ECTACO, known as the preeminent handheld language source, has developed and distributed devices and linguistic software in over 200 languages since 1990. A natural union of both companies occurred when ECTACO developed a dedicated eBook reader - ECTACO jetBook Color – which carries the highly regarded concept of “healthy reading”.

The jetBook Color was conceived by ECTACO to provide schools with benefits that cut costs and increase student productivity. Alongside being the only touchscreen color E Ink eReader in the world, it’s preloaded with many academic tools and resources such as the Oxford talking dictionaries and SAT prep courses; Math, Physics, Chemistry, Geography, and Biology references; graphing, accounting, and scientific calculators; multilingual talking translators; fluent Text To Speech for all books – a useful feature for students with dyslexia and more. Most significantly, it enables schools to add their own content in a multitude of formats at no additional cost. This means that every eTextbook purchased can instantly be loaded to the jetBook Color, along with any notes, homework, and other reading materials as well. The revolutionary color ePaper display delivers a high-contrast, sunlight readable, low-power performance that further closes the digital divide between paper and electronic displays. This is the only eye friendly type of display developed exclusively for the education community.

Many schools eager to procure the jetBook Color have discovered their current textbooks are not made available to them in digital format by their publishers. As a result, they have sought alternative publications that could be implemented into jetBook Color. AMSCO has recognized this dilemma and been considerate in uniting with ECTACO to address the needs of many schools nationwide. All AMSCO titles are now available for schools to review, purchase, and download through their jetBook Color “textbook console”. “Schools continued to ask us about which publishers we were aware of that could provide them with PDFs or ePUB or other formats compatible with their curriculums”, states David Lubinitsky, CEO, Ectaco, Inc. “Amongst all the publishers we reached out to, AMSCO stepped to the forefront of addressing the needs of those schools expeditiously - our orders have increased significantly as a result of this union and we look forward to convince educators to use AMSCO content on a larger scale.”

Contact Tim Houston at timothy.houston@ectacoinc.com or 800-784-8444 for further information.

*****
AMSCO is dedicated to providing high quality, inexpensive textbooks and support materials to the educational community. Their course texts, review, and test prep books reflect national and state standards for curriculum and assessment.

ECTACO, Inc., is a New York based company specializing in multilingual global communications, with more than 21 years of experience, 18 offices and millions of satisfied customers.



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jetBook Color - The Solution to the iPad Problem

We came across an article on Wired this morning displaying the issues with iPad, colleges, and textbooks.

Our conclusion - USE THE JETBOOK COLOR!

The article below goes through issues students can encounter. Now the jetBook Color solves the majority of them while letting you be in charge of your own content - getting it where you want or creating it, and loading it on the the JBC without hassle.

Not only that, it's safe, Safe for your eyes that is. Backlit screens will burn your eyes out faster than attending Woodstock circa 1969. Keep your vision, and keep your own files with the jetBook Color:

Source: Wired
Link: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/01/apple-college-bookstores/2/

Image of an Inkling anatomy textbook, courtesy Inkling

On its face, matching iPad textbooks with college students seems almost perfect. But Apple’s plans for its new iBookstore, from the way it has structured book purchases to its development strategy for multimedia e-books, doesn’t seem like it’s well suited for the college textbook market at all — if it even has that target in mind.

To be fair, Apple’s presentation at its education event last Thursday was overwhelmingly focused on the K-12 market. Phil Schiller diagnosed a handful of this system’s maladies: low rates of high school graduation, overcrowded public school classrooms, and the United States’ position relative to the rest of the world in K-12 educational achievement. The prescription? iPads — with multimedia textbooks sold through iBooks, created in iBooks Author and, augmented with syllabi and podcasts through iTunes U.Apple and its publishing partners even showed off new digital science textbooks for high school students.

But there are serious obstacles even with bringing Apple’s iPads and iBooks into primary and high schools, let alone them having a substantially positive impact there. The best overview of the market Apple’s is entering is probably Laura Hazard Owen’s “What Apple Is Wading Into: A Snapshot Of The K-12 Textbook Business.” Meanwhile, Audrey Watters cuts sharply into the shortcomings of Apple’s economic implications for schools in “Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-Revolution.” And I wrote about the complex requirements both textbook publishers and electronic technology must meet in order to be used in institutions as multi-layered and multi-regulated like public schools — complexity that even made Steve Jobs once doubt whether technology could be used to “fix” education.

University professors, along with other experts and stakeholders in the college textbook market, are even more skeptical. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Pomona College professor and director of scholarly communication for the Modern Language Association, was troubled by the limited view of interactivity modeled in the new iBooks — interaction between a student and a screen, not students with one another — as well as the limitation of these new textbooks to only Apple’s platform and format.

Multi-platform support is especially an issue in colleges and universities, since, as digital publishing expert and ex-Encyclopaedia Britannica CEO Joseph Esposito notes, college students typically purchase their own computing hardware, rather than the institution. For this reason, Esposito believes adoption of iBooks would take longer in college than K-12, except in some contexts where the institution either mandates the purchase of specific devices or supplies them directly to students. Even if Apple’s publishing partners — who, let’s not forget, have a brisk business selling to college and university bookstores too — make a big push into the college marketplace through iBooks, professors may be reluctant to assign digital copies only to students if it requires them to buy an iPad costing $500 or more.

Battle of the business models: straw purchases versus volume licensing

Inkling CEO (and former Apple education employee) Matt MacInnis doesn’t currently make content for all platforms; Inkling makes multimedia college textbooks (Inkling calls them “Smartbooks”) exclusively for the iPad, with many of the same textbook partners now developing products for the new iBooks. (McGraw-Hill and Pearson are both investors in Inkling.) But as Inkling moves toward a cross-platform future, MacInnis still thinks Inkling still has a solid advantage over Apple when it comes to serving colleges and universities, even on the iPad.

“Over time, in K-12, Apple and the iPad will be the leader,” MacInnis told Wired. “Apple is building that ecosystem by hook or by crook. But that won’t be the case in the higher education market.”

At most colleges and universities today, textbooks are selected by professors and instructors, ordered by campus bookstores, then purchased by students. But most digital resources — database subscriptions, image, video and audio collections, plus electronic news sources and medical, scientific and scholarly journals — are purchased by universities, generally hosted and/or managed through college libraries.

MacInnis believes that at colleges and universities, this kind of bulk purchasing — or really, bulk subscription-based licensing — is the most likely emerging model for electronic textbooks, too. Every student (or some subset enrolled in a course) would have university-paid electronic access to the textbook as long as they are students.

Inkling has sold textbooks to University of California, Irvine through a bulk institutional purchase, with Irvine then assigning license numbers to students. California State-Northridge paid for a university-wide site license to Nature Publishing’s Principles of Biology digital textbook last year. UC-Berkeley, Cornell, Virginia, and the universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin-Madison are currently collectively piloting a program licensing textbooks published by McGraw-Hill. At Brown University, another of Inkling’s institutional partners, medical students are required to purchase both iPads and three Inkling textbooks; here, MacInnis says, an institutional licensing model would be natural.

So Apple’s model for iBooks, at least in the K-12 context, asks schools to buy iPads, plus individual textbook licenses for each student. It’s a straw purchase, made and paid for by the institution, but on the student’s behalf. Every book is associated with a unique Apple ID — that currently, at least, has to be assigned to a single person — so every student has access to his or her textbooks forever. Meanwhile, colleges and universities have been moving toward a purchasing model that arguably makes more sense in K-12: volume licenses for textbooks held on a subscription basis by the institution, not the student.

Students may buy iPads and then buy textbooks from Apple, particularly if their institution and teachers encourage them to do so. But they’re much less likely to if there is already a multiplatform textbook that’s provided by the university.

The problem of plenitude: How many books does your bookstore carry?

Image via Barnes & Noble College

Barnes & Noble knows the college bookstore market very well. Its College division does half as much business as the retail division — and the numbers are much closer in quarters when semesters begin. It’s also sold e-textbooks since 2003.

“Back then, we could barely sell one to anybody,” B&N College VP Jade Roth told Wired. “There wasn’t enough content, the tech wasn’t ready, and the students weren’t ready.”

One of the biggest problems with the textbook market, Roth says — and one which puts Apple or any company hoping to develop many enhanced or multimedia textbooks — are the sheer number of books selected for college courses. A K-12 classroom or even a school district may be able to get by with a small number of subject texts, They’ll be selected at the district level, standardized by state boards or the new U.S. Common Core curriculum, and all of the big textbooks will sell plenty of copies.

For college, Roth says, professors assign — and Barnes & Noble sells — 210,000 unique titles in textbooks alone. Add in the wider universe of trade books — college classes like Plato’s Republic orMoby Dick, and the number goes up to 2.5 million. These come from textbook publishers, big trades, small and independent presses, university presses, cheap mass-market editions, and more. With so many books, covering such a wide range of subject matter, published by so many presses, it’s extraordinarily difficult to make a comprehensive move to digital. It’s not quite on the scale of Google Books’ digitization of university library holdings, but arguably closer to that than partnering up to sell half a dozen high school science textbooks from three different publishers.

This is why Barnes & Noble has generally opted for simpler copies of digital textbooks, augmented with its multiplatform NOOK Study textbook reading and note-taking application. It’s fashionable to slam publishers and retailers for selling what are sometimes called glorified PDFs. Still, between those copies and E Ink, this is the easiest and most effective way to get enough titles available that professors can order what they want, and students can buy what they need.

Roth sees growth in digital textbooks as part of a broader transformation in the economics of the college textbook industry. “Within the last years, we’ve had an explosion in print rentals, which profoundly changed how college bookstores worked,” she says. (Chegg is probably the best-known textbook rental company — it, too, is now also working with e-textbooks — but Barnes & Noble’s college bookstores added rentals as an option fairly quickly.)

“It’s a great time for college bookstores, because we now have many more options for cost-effective learning materials,” Roth says. “The professor still chooses the material, but students can choose to buy or rent either print or digital copies of the same book. When we give the students more options at more price points, they like us better.”

That emphasis on consumer choice isn’t just plain vanilla, free-market ideology; it reflects the basic heterogeneity of college students — and even colleges themselves. “Remember, these students come from all different worlds,” Roth says. “In a lecture hall of 250 students, all with different economic concerns, one might have an iPad, another a PC, another a print rental…. We’re moving into a digital world, but we have a long way to go.”

Most likely, that digital world won’t be one world, with one kind of reader; another strike against Apple, iPad and iBooks.

The born-digital future

“The challenges of transforming the education market make transforming the music industry look easy,” says Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps. “It’s like dealing with the enterprise and the government market combined.”

Still, just as we had music MP3s long before the iTunes Store, the digital transformation of education is already underway. And even if Apple doesn’t end up exerting nearly as much power over this market as they have in music, the blend of digital authoring tools, learning organization applications and multimedia books will likely still shape what will happen next.

“At Inkling, we have great technology, we have great publishing partners, and we make a terrific product,” MacInnis told me. “But we can’t shine the same spotlight on what we do or on what can be done that Apple can.

“What Apple’s announcement does is move us into a world where all publishers have to think about creating books that are natively digital,” he said, adding that everywhere Apple falls short, whether it’s in the college market or pro-style authoring tools that give serious publishers more power than iBooks Author, Inkling and other software developers will fill in the gap.

Rotman Epps sees the same pattern: “iBooks Author helps democratize content production. It gives small developers the same tools as big publishers. Those developers can build upon and extend that platform with HTML5 and JavaScript, creating not just tools and widgets, but smaller companies that bigger publishers can acquire.”

How does that digital future square with the entrenched culture of college and university campuses? It’s always worth remembering that tablets and e-readers don’t just aim to replace books, but entire bookstores. Nothing is immune from digital disruption, and the textbook industry is perhaps especially ripe for it. But it would still be a profound transformation for a 9.7″ tablet and an Apple Store to replace the college bookstore and the university library as the twin foci of information on campus.

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The Most Genuine jetBook K-12 Review We've Ever Found

Wow, we get a lot of reviews but there are always some that need to be mentioned. The one that blew us away was written by Ellen Christian (links to her posts will be below along with the post). It's one thing when people post to attract traffic to their site, it's another when people write a genuine review about a product that actually helps students - this is the latter, and we wanted to share this with all our readers. Enjoy!

Links:
Confessions Of An Over-Worked Mom
Seattle Examiner - They picked up the article :)
Blogcritics

Why do you need an educational eBook system?  With a son in high school and a daughter who just started college, I am well aware of all of the electronic gadgets and shelves of reference books that are needed for our children to be prepared for tests and projects as they get older. When my kids were younger, all I needed to worry about was their lunchbox and maybe a package of crayons or markers.  Now that they are older, parents need to provide a dictionary in both English and their language of choice, a variety of reference books,  a graphing calculator, and tons of books that will help them do research and prepare for projects and SATs. Both my kids have ADHD/ADD which means it can be difficult for them to focus on school work.   Both kids find it helpful to be “plugged in” while working on homework because it helps them concentrate.  It’s even written into my son’s 504 plan than he can use music and electronics to help him concentrate on tests and assignments in class.

Classrooms aren’t the same as they were when I was younger. Now, kids have to be online and it is required in many cases.   Having access to reference books and information is a necessity. The hours that our library is open are so limited that I often just can’t get there when I’m available. The ectaco jetBook K-12  educational eBook system is a specialized eBook reader that helps motivate kids to want to read and learn. Students find it much easier to use an electronic device than to flip through pages in a book or hunt through stacks of references in the library. Not only does the jetBook K-12 system hold their interest longer, it gives them access to a much larger selection of books than they might find available in their local library.

Simply said, the jetBook K-12 is a portable educational eBook system that contains everything your child will need including an SAT Preparation Course, Talking Oxford College Dictionary, English/Spanish Text Translator, SpeedReading Course, Phonetic Language Teacher, Graphic Calculator, Physics Reference Book, Periodict Table of Elements, and US History and Facts.  There is even s a My Library section that is used to hold ebooks. There is a microSD card included that has 1,000 classic books and open source books from the 50 states reading list.

Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll find in each section of the jetBook K-12:

My Library – Favorites, Summary, Notes, Bookmarks, Speech Recognition, Word Explanation

SAT Preparation Course – SAT Words, Grammar, Essay Hints, Root Dictionary, Sentence Completion, Problem Solving

Talking Oxford College Dictionary – Talking Oxford English ->Spanish Dictionary (56 more languages available), Idioms, Vocabulary Builder

English -> Spanish Text Translator – 12 more languages available, Irregular Verbs, Grammar Course, Translation Test, Linguistic Crossword

Speed Reading Course – Tachistoscope, Speed Reading Statistics, Practice Mode, Speed Reading Tests, Sudoku, Flash Cards

Phonetic Language Teacher – 45 More Languages Available, Speech Analysis & Correction, Phrases, Dialogs

Physics Reference Book – Organic, Inorganic & General Chemistry, Math Reference Book, World Economics & Geography

Periodic Table of Elements – Order Number, Atomic Weight, Oxidation States, Electron Configuration, Melting/Boiling Points, Covalent Radius

US History and Facts – Principles of American Democracy, American History, Government, Integrated Civics, Important Dates

The jetBook K-12 package includes the jetBook K-12, ectaco /c-pen, microSD card, carrying case, silicone pouch, pro headset with microphone, cradle and chargers. The eBook system itself is very simple to use. It contains a small trackball to use like a mouse to move the cursor up and down. It also has three buttons to move up and down and back and forth, select, record your voice, listen to the recording on the jetBook K-12 and play the audio books and music. There is even a mini USB port so you can charge the unit and a headset jack so you can use the earphones that are included.  Things that can be listened to have a speaker symbol next to them for easy reference. This feature is very helpful in pronunciation for unfamiliar vocabulary words. You can see the correct spelling of the word and then listen to the pronunciation in English or in a different language. The unit comes with Spanish but there are other languages available as well.

I am really amazed with all the information available on the jetBook K-12.  The math help section itself is unbelievable. It has definitions for Algebra, Calculus, Geometry and Trigonometry along with examples of what the definitions are. So if you happen to need to know what a quadratic equation is, you can see what it looks like! Maybe you’re more interested in accounting information? If that’s the case, there is an accounting and loan calculator included! There’s also a scientific calculator and a graphing calculator. There is a metric conversion function as well. The next time my son asks for math help, I am all set!   This educational eBook system will take him all the way through high school because it has information on physics, chemistry, earth science, biology, the periodic table, etc.

I’m really enjoying the World Economics and Geography section myself. I love learning about other countries. All I have to do is pick a country and it gives me a background of the country, geography (including location, coordinates, map reference, area, land boundaries, coastline, climate, resources, land use, water resources, elevation, natural hazards, current issues, international agreements), people (population, age structure, median age, population growth, birth & death rates, migration, etc.)  There are 17 pages of information on Afghanistan alone!  Your child could easily write a report on the country of their choice by using only the information I found in the jetBook K-12.

If English is more your thing, there is a phonetic language teacher, pictured dictionary, audio phrase book, 180 language dictionary, vocabulary builder, flash cards, crossword, spell it right, sudoku, and flash cards so you can quiz yourself on different words.  There are words in business, law, medical, and general categories. There’s even a translation test to quiz yourself on.  There is also a section with English grammar helps including irregular verbs, idioms, English  to Spanish grammar help, Spanish to English Grammar help. There are eBooks to read and audio books to listen to. There are tons of classics including some that my daughter is reading in college so this is going to save us money because I won’t need to run out and buy the hard copy books.

There is a PC communications area on the device that allows you to manage your files and folders stored on the microSD card. This lets you add books and music files. You connect the device to your PC using the enclosed USB cable and the mini-USB port and then you navigate to the appropriate folders to copy things from one place to another.

This unit is not only great for children, it’s a fantastic resource for teachers. There is a section that contains information on how to receive grants and funding for your school and a teacher’s resource section.  You can also access the 50 states reading lists that are open source. This selection includes things like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jane Eyre, A Tale of Two Cities, The Raven, The Odyssey, and tons of other classics that my kids will be reading in both high school and college.

The unit comes with an added C-Pen that means you can listen to words, phrases, and even entire sentences simply by swiping the pen. All the definitions in the Oxford dictionary can be read aloud. The added microSD card allows expansion up to 32 GB.  The jetBook K-12 can support over 9 different formats including Adobe DRM . You can get books almost anywhere online including Barnes & Noble, Kobo Books and at your local library. You can even create your own files, folders, or texts, and load them to the jetBook as well. Read Books in Adobe DRM 9.1, ePub, Mobi, PRC, PDB, RTF, TXT, HTML, PDF, FB2.  It has a 5″ TFT screen that is very easy on the eyes to use. The jetBook K-12 can operate fully charged up to 26 hours. It measures  4″ x 6″ x 0.6″ and weighs only 6.5 ounces. It can be purchased in yellow, white, or black.

If you’re looking for an educational eBook system, this is definitely the one you need to choose. I truly cannot think of anything that should be on here that isn’t and it’s all easy to use and easy to find. This is truly an investment in your child’s education.

Article first published as Educational eReader Review: ECTACO jetBook K-12 Educational eBook System on Blogcritics.

Disclosure: I received a product or products in order to write my review.  All opinions are mine and mine alone. I am disclosing this in accordance with FTC 16 CFR Part 255 concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising.

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Ectaco jetBook Color Triumphs at CES 2012 - Recap

ECTACO’s jetBook Color Triumphs at CES 2012

Long Island City, New York – Las Vegas - January, 31, 2011

ECTACO, the recipient of the prestigious 2012 CES Innovation Award for the jetBook Color Educational eBook System, is proud to announce one of the most successful CES years ever experienced.

It’s one thing to attend CES as an exhibitor; it’s an entirely different world exhibiting after winning the CES Innovations Award. That’s how the show can be summed up for us. Not only did we have a crowd at our booth at every minute of every day, but we also had some of the most incredible technology seen to date in the tablet/eBook Reader world – Color E Ink.

Being the first to utilize a technology that has been sought after since the inception of eBook Readers really set us apart from the endless rows of cases for your phone and TV’s – literally, phone cases and TV’s were the only thing we saw at the show!

The exhibition of the jetBook Color was thrilling not only for the visitors, who seemed to favor Ectaco’s booth, but for the company itself as well. “We’ve had people from all over the world stopping by.” –David Lubinitsky, CEO, shares his experience - “The visitors were impressed by the success the device was having in Russia and Ukraine and were interested in establishing the same system for education in their countries as well.”

The 9.7” screen jetBook Color is the world’s first to utilize eye-friendly Triton Color E Ink technology in an eBook Reader oriented solely towards education. The main screen serves as an ID card for the student displaying a schedule of classes (updated daily via Wi-Fi), list of student's and teacher's notes, homework and classwork, and a designated channel for instant communication with any teacher. The same home screen will boast an application list based on student's grade and classes with the following topics: My Library, eTextbooks in work, Classwork and Homework, Oxford Reading Support, Languages and Games, Science and Math. Subsections within these applications will aid students to be on top of their classwork and pair technology with the classroom creating a fully interactive and intellectually stimulating environment connected to worldwide educational resources.

Along with the most sophisticated and functional eBook Reader software, the jetBook Color features the content of a 50-state reading list, teacher and school administrator resources, and a fully interactive SAT course that will train, test, and raise students’ SAT scores.  A Speed Reading course that will teach students to read and comprehend text faster, Talking Oxford Dictionaries narrated by professional linguists, course of English and foreign language grammar, speech recognition and speech analysis Language Teacher ® and U-Learn™ courses that teach any of the 52 available languages and provide great support to ESL students. Pictured dictionaries for 36 languages, cross translator for 180 languages, Vocabulary Builder, Linguistic Crosswords, reference materials in Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography and Earth Science, Interactive Periodic Table of Elements, graphing and scientific calculators and more.

“This was a truly exciting week for us. Seeing all the enthusiasm and interest of future business partners, educators, and visitors was out of this world.” - Says Greg Stetson, Product Manager – “With the educational experience we have in the Eastern European market, we are thrilled to enter the US and worldwide educational scene with the jetBook Color.”

For more information visit www.ectaco.com or contact Greg Stetson at 718-728-6110 ext. 212 orgreg@ectaco.com.

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jetBook Color Vids and More!

We've been shipping our jetBook Color pre-orders since the 16th of January and are happy that people have been writing us with their positive experiences! From lawyers loading dockets for cases to grad students having all their teachers' notes in one place instead of 500 pieces of loose paper floating around, we are always excited when we can make such a positive impact on peoples lives!

Below we've compiled a few videos from CES and other places that talk about the jetBook Color. Though freedom to load your own content to it and the safe (non-backlit) screen we hope a lot more people will be attracted to it as well!!

Source: Engadget article here



Source: Goodereader



Source: Ectaco



Source: Fox News and Ectaco



Sourrce: Altroconsumo



Source: Slashgear



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Tablets suck for long periods of reading....YUP!

Try focusing your attention to the intricate detail of letters and words when reading off a backlit screen.....tired?....fuzzy eyesight?....headache?....exactly.

Plain and simple, just like your Mama used to say "Don't watch TV for too long!"....and..... "Don't stare at that computer for too long!". We've always asked 'why' but deep down we knew it was horrible for our eyesight.

Now here's an excerpt from PCAuthority about it. You can find the entire article in the link below.

Tablets suck for long periods of reading

Several of us in the PC & Tech Authority editorial room have both tablets and ebook readers, actively preferring the non-backlit nature of e-ink for long periods of reading. So when you are poring over the pages of words that make up the majority of most textbooks you would be much better off doing it on an eReader. The corollary to this is that currently colour e-ink exists largely as a proof of concept solution, there have been few actual product releases (the most prominent actually uses a completely different technology to e-ink, called mirasol, which has the same non-backlit nature).

The one area where colour e-ink is perfectly suited for is textbooks, but there is still a way to go before the kind of rich video features work with the technology. While tablets are currently a better solution, we cannot envision a world in which Apple would produce eReaders for students, especially when it can keep pumping out the same old iPads without the massive expensive of tooling up a new factory and product line. This is core to our final concern.

Source: PCAuthority. Read the entire article here

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Ectaco jetBook Color on Fox News

There were 2 things we loved about CES 2012 in Vegas...No, we didn't gamble away our life savings, BUT....

1) We won the CES 2012 Innovation Award for the jetBook Color and Partner LUX
2) We were featured on Fox News

Not a lot of people can say they had one of the above, let alone two!

Below we've edited the video from the Fox News excerpt. If you can't load the embedded one, you can also find it here



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CES 2012 jetBook Color on Altroconsumo (Italian)

Great video (in Italian) from Italy's Altroconsumo on the jetBook Color. We met them at CES 2012 and they were ecstatic to see a Color E Ink reader finally available on the market.....and so are we OBV!

Embedded video below, but you can also find there here



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jetBook K-12 Video Manual

Here is one of the most thorough video manuals we have ever put together. A big thanks to Greg Stetson for making it happen and taking the time to walk us through.

You can scroll down to the description and get linked to each section of the jetBook K-12. In each section, Greg will go over the functions and applications so you can do the same on your device and be a jetBook K-12 world championnn!!!!!!

Link to the video here 
(Embedded one below)



00:50 - My Library - Basic functions, speech recognition for each section, text to speech for books, in book menus: translate, speak, select, etc.,

05:10 - Oxford Reading Support - Oxford talking dictionary, Oxford English-Spanish dictionary, SAT prep course, speedreading course, Cpen Scanner features, English-Spanish text translator, irregular verbs, idioms, Spanish grammar in English, English grammar in Spanish and English grammar in English

15:59 - Language and Games - Language Teacher, ending audio introductions, U-Learn, audio phrasebook, pictured dictionary, 180 cross-translator, vocabulary builder, linguistic crosswords, linguistic flashcards, pockets, translation test, spell-it-right and sudoku

24:50 - Science and Math - Graphing, scientific and accounting calculators, world economics and geography books, US history and facts, Math, Chemistry, Earth Science, Physics and Biology reference guides, metric conversion and interactive periodic table of elements

29:49 - Audio Book and Music/Extras and Help


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