the growing popularity of the e-book - Amazon Kindle e-book downloads outsell paperbacks

Friends
In an earlier mail, I discussed how a 'e-book' could be a source of thousands of texts/learning resources which teachers/schools could use and at the same time not be a 'physical burden' for the learner.

Amazon company was the first 'e-book' seller and now there are many. In the future, this e-book will also become a 'e-notebook' on which student can write her notes/workings etc... And since it is battery run, it is less impacted by electricity non availability. And as technology improves, it will become more robust, require much lesser power, be easier to read than a computer screen (it already is much better).

The news item http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12305015 (below) discusses how the Kindle e-books now sell more than paperbacks (books).

While the idea of an e-book is extension of the 'digital society' into the classroom and has huge potential for huge benefits to teachers and learners by allowing access to rich and diverse resources, the danger would lie in it being a proprietary device owned by a single vendor. The e-resources belong to Amazon and Amazon will guard its control over the same .... Using 'open e-reader' platforms will mean that teachers, teacher educators and students will be able to also share their own resources over the e-readers, which makes collaborative construction of knowledge possible. On a digital platform, collabortive knowledge construction (also using tools like wiki) will provide a huge support the creating large freely shareable knowledge resources for building our knowledge society. A knowledge society is possible only when knowledge resources are (benefit of) for  all, (owned by) of all and (created) by all.

regards,
Guru

Amazon Kindle e-book downloads outsell paperbacks

Amazon has announced that in the US it sold more e-books for its Kindle device (SEE ATTACHED PICTURE)  than it sold paperback books in the last three months of 2010.... Amazon announced that in the US since the start of the year it had sold 115 e-book downloads for every 100 paperback books, even excluding its downloads of free books. But it stressed that sales of paperback books were also growing. "Last July we announced that Kindle books had passed hardcovers and predicted that Kindle would surpass paperbacks in the second quarter of this year," said Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. "So this milestone has come even sooner than we expected - and it's on top of continued growth in paperback sales." It has not said how many of its Kindle devices it has sold, but did say that they had overtaken the final book in the Harry Potter series to become the top-selling item in Amazon's history