At press time, it was unclear how long Barnes and Noble (B&N) would continue marketing Nook-branded hardware.

B&N sent me a pair of Nook models late last winter. I liked both, but tabled my reviews when rumors surfaced in February that B&N might close its hardware side and focus on app-based content sales through third-party devices. Speculation then intensified as B&N offered discounts and freebies to accelerate stalling sales, then opened up the limited Nook tablet ecosystem in May to allow Nook HD and HD+ users to access all Android apps and content.

Then reports swirled that Microsoft, holding a 17 percent stake in Nook Media, B&N’s
digital content and devices arm, was poised to bid a billion dollars to buy the division outright.

That would allow Microsoft to compete with industry rivals who were already content providers, like Apple and Google. Some predicted that Microsoft would include preinstalled Nook apps on upcoming mobile devices powered by Windows 8 RT. Meanwhile, B&N stock prices, up nearly 25 percent when Microsoft rumors peaked, dropped as they subsided. I’ll keep you posted on all things Nook as the facts shake out, so stay tuned. Meantime, here’s my take on two Nook devices.

Nook Simple Touch with “GlowLight”

Barnes & Noble was the first to boast that their Nook Simple Touch reader with GlowLight ($119, at left) was as as readable in a dark bedroom as it is on a sunny beach and is the best dedicated ereader on the planet. Its sole focus is delivering a comfortable, elegant textual experience, period.

Beyond the built-in WiFi allowing B&N bookstore purchases and downloads, librarians will appreciate that the Simple Touch handles DRM-protected EPUB and PDF files transferred via USB, making it library-loan friendly. Under seven ounces and with totally intuitive controls, low-key design, and a nimble, six-inch, 600 x 800 touchscreen, the Simple Touch can be unboxed, charged up, and used without even thinking about it.

That’s how I like my gadgets. The GlowLight feature is an easily activated, adjustable light from eight LEDs that gently illuminate the E Ink Pearl screen from the front. It’s perfect for nocturnal readers who don’t want to disturb their snoozing bedfellows.

The GlowLight cuts the use-per-charge time roughly in half, but B&N still promises “over a month” of reading time with the GlowLight on and WiFi off. You can expect about 15 hours of GlowLight reading per charge.

Nook HD (8 GB) 7-inch tablet

When released in November 2012, the Nook HD ($199, above right) was a “walled garden” device, only offering access to B&N-approved content and apps. Following the poor holiday sales, B&N opened up access to the Google Play store on its HD and HD+ (nine-inch) tablets in early May. That gave users access to over 700,000 Android apps and a constellation of Google services including the Chrome browser and Google apps.

A Mother’s Day promotion offered the 8GB HD for $149, probably boosting spring sales. But adding Google Play Store came at a price for B&N, allowing users to buy content from Amazon, Google, and Kobo.

The 8GB Nook HD was worth the $199 price. It has the highest resolution display (1400 x 900, 243 pixels per inch) of any seven-inch tablet. Compare that to the iPad Mini with its 163-pixel-per-inch display. I didn’t mind the Nook HD’s lack of cameras. It has the stuff to handle most multimedia: a headset jack, a mic, rear-facing stereo speakers, and the ability to play 720p video. At just over 11 ounces, it’s 2.8 ounces lighter than the Kindle Fire HD.

My only complaint was occasional sluggishness with lots of apps running. Sometimes, the carousel menu was unresponsive. Fortunately, the Advanced Task Killer app fixed that.

I wasn’t a big fan of the first 2009 Nook. But I’ve warmed to Nooks as they’ve risen to the top of the heap. I’ve always appreciated that Nooks were ebook loan friendly, and I hope they will compete and survive. Visit Barnes and Noble for information on all Nook devices.

Jeffrey Hastings (hastingj@howellschools.com) is a library media specialist at Highlander Way Middle School in Howell, MI.

Think I’m just a pathetic old librarian desperately in need of a new hobby? I challenge you to sign up for a free trial and not get hooked. This is unusually good courseware and real head-candy for infogeeks like me. In fact, it’s just about everything we try and teach condensed into a single convenient, Web-based and tablet-friendly can.

A pair of line-drawn cartoon characters lead students through the lessons in a way that’s breezy without being cheesy. One is an earnest ResearchReady student named Scott, the other an information-illiterate owl named Bubo who thinks he knows it all. Together, they cover topics like the differences between primary and secondary sources and between popular and scholarly ones. They talk about how search engines work, what “The Invisible Web” is and how research databases are different. They send students out to real-world sources and ask them to evaluate their purpose, usefulness, and credibility. They devote a solid chunk of time to covering Wikipedia in particular, and do so in a thorough and even-handed way, discussing its strengths and weaknesses, and teaching students to tap the history and references sections to evaluate Wikipedia articles on a case-by-case basis. Of course, learning to properly cite sources in order to provide evidence and avoid plagiarism is also stressed. In short, ResearchReady systematically covers all the research-related Common Core standards that school librarians and ELA teachers lie awake at night wondering how on Earth to address.

Launched in January 2012 and still in beta, ResearchReady features quickly evolving course management tools for tracking individual and class progress and understanding, plus it allows teachers to add, remove, or adjust lesson content. ResearchReady can be used in its entirety as linear courseware, or librarians and teachers can have their classes pop in randomly to reinforce just the skills they’ll need to undertake a given research task.

As mentioned, I’ve been a school librarian for a while now, and I once believed that I could cover an entire information literacy curriculum simply by co-teaching library research projects on a catch-as-catch-can basis. I’ve long since realized that I can’t reliably do that. That’s why I recommend ResearchReady as a practical prerequisite to provide high school students with a foundation of instruction and practice that imparts the knowledge and skills they’ll need to conduct effective and ethical, college-level research.

“If you think about math teachers, they’ve always been able to give assignments in which students are required to show their work. That makes it easy for them to check individual understanding, pretty much on a daily basis. English and humanities teachers who give extended reading assignments have never had that luxury. Instead, they’ve comparatively been flying blind, taking it on faith that most students have done the required reading, without knowing for sure, and moving along daily without solid evidence that kids are really ‘getting it.’”

That’s what Jason Singer, the CEO and founder of Gobstopper, told me was the central issue his product is designed to address: the challenge of ensuring that every student is meaningfully moving forward in a given reading assignment—and not just faking it. Gobstopper is an ereading application that also promotes ongoing feedback between teachers and kids. How does it do that? By giving teachers the ability to embed customized, Common-Core-based, formative assessments right into the etexts that they assign to their kids. Teachers can also insert scaffolded support in the form of annotations, Web links, or links to video-sharing sites. (Imagine the power a teacher would have if she posted videos that explained her own reactions to and interpretations of portions of a text.) Teachers can also add polls and quizzes, turning those assigned texts into ongoing class conversations and providing students, through Gobstopper’s reporting tools, with both qualitative feedback and quantitative snapshots about individual and group progress and comprehension.

Just by glancing at their Gobstopper dashboards, teachers can see what percentage of kids in a specific class did their homework, how much time they spent reading, and what percentage of questions in a given Common Core standard such as “determining author intent” or “understanding historical context” their students answered correctly. Not only does that option eliminate the immense amount of time a typical humanities teacher wastes in class just trying to get a basic feel for who has actually completed and understood their assigned reading, but it cuts down on manual grading and attendant paperwork as well. Teachers needn’t necessarily enhance the etexts they assign from scratch, either. Instead they can select from among what Gobstopper calls “curriculets,” adding layers of ready-made content and assessments based on the skills they want to cover, and then tweaking the items to taste. For more information or to sign up and try Gobstopper, visit the welcome page for SLJ readers.

Subtext, launched a year ago and currently available as a free iPad and Edmodo app, is another application that doubles as a collaborative reading platform that focuses on Common Core skills. Subtext’s ereader has all the features—including text-to-speech capability, full-text searching, font selection, and a built-in dictionary—that you’d expect from a modern ereader app. Plus, in the right-hand margins of assigned selections, you’ll find teacher and student comments, links, embedded YouTube videos, quizzes, and polls, all indicated by familiar Facebook-like avatars that transform the normally solitary act of assigned reading into a friendly, ongoing social exchange that encourages students to “talk to the text” and to talk to one another. At the end of each chapter of the novels I previewed, students were asked—in Facebook’s thumbs up/thumbs down fashion—to rate the section. They were also invited to add a comment or prediction, start or join a discussion thread, or blog about the chapter they’d just finished reading.

Subtext works with any native or converted EPUB document, integrates with Google Books and Feedbooks, and Web pages can also be imported. According to Heidi Perry, Subtext’s marketing VP, lots of instructors choose to share assigned texts—and all of the ongoing classroom sidebars—on their interactive whiteboards during class time, not exactly “flipping” the typical ELA classroom, but certainly turning it inside out in a way that exposes the collective metacognitive underpinnings of the reading experience. Teachers can set up classes in Subtext from scratch or students can log into Subtext using their existing school-provided Google or Edmodo accounts. Subtext is working on creating an Android app and Web reader for the 2013-2014 school year. To find out more or to download the free app, visit www.subtext.com.

Both Gobstopper and Subtext are currently free at their most basic levels and when used with public domain texts. Neither has set a pricing plan for premium service levels that they’ll be offering in the future. Both companies, though, plan to monetize, in part by sharing profits on ebook sales. Subtext already partners with Google Books to offer convenient in-app ebook purchases that can be seamlessly delivered to entire classes, and Gobstopper is looking to have publishers on board by next fall.

Subtext and Gobstopper excite the English teacher and school librarian in me, opening up lots of new possibilities for collaboration and curation. And both applications completely blow the tired old book report options out of the water and instead encourage reading, analysis, and writing on a formative, rather than a summative, basis.

Plus, I can totally imagine using either app to remotely administer a summer reading program… preferably as I relax on a private island somewhere in the tropics. Sound good?

Beyond those bells and whistles, where the Sky smartpen really shines—like the Echo and Pulse models before it—is its capacity to record and post audio-enhanced notes called “pencasts.” And the addition of WiFi in this newest model greatly improves the convenience of doing so. As soon as you’re done taking notes, the Sky immediately syncs them with your free Evernote account, which includes 500 MB of free storage. Tethering’s no longer necessary. From Evernote, you can replay the pencasts and hear the recorded audio as your original notes are highlighted. You can also share pencasts from Evernote on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, or as an email or Web link. Want to bypass Evernote? Direct wireless sharing is promised soon. Livescribe expects direct exporting to email and Facebook to come this month, with the service extending to Dropbox and Google Drive accounts by year’s end. Spotty WiFi? Then download an app called “Livescribe Helper” for Windows or Mac, which allows you to upload pencasts via USB and a ’net connected computer.

Livescribe smartpens like the Sky have a tiny camera recessed below the pen tip that reads barely visible dots on special paper. The dots are encoded with location information that makes it possible to replicate the motion of the pen tip—reproducing the original notes—and the dots also provide cues for recording, playback, and other menu functions. The smartpens only work with Livescribe’s dot paper, available in a selection of notepad and journal styles starting at $8.95 per package or printable from Livescribe’s website. Audio is captured by a built-in microphone in the front of the pen, or you can
buy a set of earbuds that also contain a pair of 3-D binaural microphones for higher fidelity audio pickup for $19.95. The Sky charges via a supplied USB cable or an available A/C holster adapter. It charges in about two hours, with about six hours of operation with WiFi on. Users can expect about 100 hours of recording capability per GB of pen storage.

The Sky smartpen is a convenient way for students and teachers to take and share notes. Teachers could even share links to entire notebooks of pencasts or use Sky smartpens to compile digital portfolios. There’s a lot of educational potential. You can hear a brief sample pencast, which I recorded with the built-in mic.

McGraw Hill SmartBook

Despite the much-publicized grumblings about CES being less relevant this year due to the direct absence of big players like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, there were clear trends and several standout products at the January Consumer Electronics Show, which will likely impact K–12 education. Here’s a short list of highlights from CES, starting with an overarching trend that’s bound to affect a wide range of devices in coming years.

The future of display technology, foretold. Just the other day, I eyed a ceiling-mounted projector in my library that cost over $5,000 back in 2000 and still works, but just can’t cut it in today’s wide-screen, HD world. Considering the prospect of replacing it, I wonder, where will it end? Well, thanks to CES, I think I know: Ultra HD. It’s the display standard that’ll set the new bar for virtually all screens in the future.

Also known as 4K or Quad HD, Ultra HD was originally driven by digital cinema’s requirement for a high-def display dense enough to look good on really huge screens. Ultra HD displays, those boasting a horizontal resolution on the order of 4,000 pixels (a common one is 3,840 x 2,160), are definitely headed for a living room TV near you. At about 8.3 megapixels, Ultra HD has four times the pixels of HDTV. It’s not just about TV, though: Panasonic debuted a 20-inch Windows 8 tablet at CES with 4K resolution, and Qualcomm announced that its newest Snapdragon 600 and 800 mobile processors are now engineered to handle Ultra HD, too, so expect Ultra HD to make its way onto the screens of even the smallest personal devices. We’ll also see more OLED screens in the marketplace, with their richer colors and higher contrasts. Samsung has introduced super-thin, bendable, nearly unbreakable OLED displays. The technology, called Youm, could make curved screens and other yummy new display form factors commercially possible. Plus, Youm mojo could prove valuable in school settings where only the toughest screens survive. Some think Ultra HD could be the ultimate display resolution, the finest display we’ll ever need… or want. Do I believe that? No. But it should satisfy us for a while.

Adaptive ebooks and courseware. Imagine textbooks that actually revise themselves on-the-fly to adjust to an individual reader’s comprehension. That’s the idea behind SmartBooks from McGraw Hill Education. They’re multi-platform etextbooks, readable online or off, that adapt to how students respond to periodic review questions, reinforcing material that needs more attention. The company uses student behavior models to create the most efficient path toward subject area mastery. McGraw Hill Education is yet to set SmartBook prices, but expects them to be comparable to standard ebooks. Pearson was also reportedly at CES promoting similar adaptive products.

Gaming pioneer Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, also believes that software that adapts to learners—keeping them on the optimum edge of their ability—maximizes academic achievement and learning enjoyment. That’s the idea behind his company, BrainRush. See how it works yourself: I challenge you to visit www.brainrush.com and take one of their sample lessons. Unless you immediately nail the drill, you’ll feel the software adjusting to your mistakes. I took the lesson on South American countries and could sense the software repeatedly trying different ways to get me to stop confusing Guyana with nearby French Guiana. Eventually, I caught on. And Paraguay is north of Uruguay… duh.

Robotics for students of all ages. Fans of Lego Mindstorms robotics kits, popular in classrooms and homes for well over a decade, will be happy to hear that a new set, Lego Mindstorms EV3, is scheduled for release this spring. The $350 kit reportedly includes 17 different bot designs. Builders can follow plans on paper or tablets, or they can invent new robots freestyle. The kit includes a variety of new and improved sensors and capabilities, has a Linux-based, programmable brick that aspiring hackers can mess with, and is compatible with Mindstorms NXT components. Students can remotely control their robotic creations with apps for iOS and Android, and curricular support is available at www.legoeducation.us.

While the Mindstorms kit is recommended for ages 10 and up, younger kids can have hi-tech fun with Cubelets from Modular Robotics. Cubelets are blocks that simply snap together; no wiring or programming is needed. Each block has either a sensor, logic, or action function. Put them together in different ways and they do different things. Kits start at $159.95.

The XO Learning Tablet. Remember the One Laptop Per Child initiative and the so-called $100 laptop from back in 2005? Well, the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit has now unveiled a commercial product, the XO Learning Tablet. Manufactured by Vivitar, it will be available in the U.S. through retailers, including WalMart, sometime next fall for a price rumored to be around $149. The 7″ tablet will feature front-and rear-facing cameras and can function as a standard Android tablet in parent mode, or a heavily skinned, child-centered, and career-focused Android tablet for kids as young as three. When it’s in child mode, young users choose a professional aspiration—say scientist, for example—and then get access to a vetted set of apps relevant to scientific pursuits. (Alas, school librarian is not currently a career choice.) A robust parental dashboard gives adults full control over their child’s access and provides detailed reports on how the tablet is being used.

And who knows what else? One of the great things about CES is that, warts and all—and no matter how cringe-worthy its keynote address might happen to be—the annual trade show retains its spirit of playful innovation. That was demonstrated this year by the number of creative products at CES that were funded through the grassroots online platform Kickstarter. Who can foresee how these products, no matter how whimsical they seem now, might wind up touching the future? Consider the Puzzlebox Orbit Brain Controlled Helicopter. While it may seem like nothing more than an impractical plaything today, the company is encouraging the development of the open-source BCI (brain-computer-interface) that controls the toy copter. BCI technology is already impacting “serious” fields like vision science and prosthetics, and—who knows?—it could even wind up affecting the most serious profession of all, education.

Launched in October 2012, StarWalk Kids currently offers 150 gorgeously designed pre-K through grade 8 ebooks from about 60 authors in its growing collection, which is expected to swell to 400 titles by the end of the 2012–2013 school year, according to Liz Nealon, cofounder of the product’s parent StarWalk Kids Media.

Tightly curated for exceptional quality, the collection is about 60 percent highly illustrated nonfiction, and all titles are simultaneous-access licensed, making a subscription to StarWalk Kids a solid way to support Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for reading and writing. Each title includes vetted links to author and illustrator information, plus a “Teaching Links” PDF that lists the related CC standards, with ideas for extending learning through supplemental classroom activities.

StarWalk ebooks are basically device agnostic and can be enjoyed using virtually any device with a Flash-enabled Web browser to display the excellent, proprietary StarWalk Reader. IPad users will also soon be able to stream StarWalk Kids titles via an HTML 5-based app currently awaiting Apple approval. Users can have titles read to them by professional narrators, with or without text highlighting, or they can read selections themselves.

Teachers will appreciate the simple yet robust toolkit built into the StarWalk Reader, which includes the ability to highlight, add notes, zoom in or out, and jump to a page by either entering a page number or mousing over the bottom of the screen to reveal page thumbnails and selecting any of them. Educators and parents can also use StarWalk’s advanced search feature to browse the collection by Lexile level, alphabetic reading level, CC standards, and other criteria.

Whether its ebook titles were initially published in print or are digital originals, StarWalk Kids is meticulous about design and offers only fixed-format ebooks to preserve their visual integrity. While they’re perfect for viewing on interactive whiteboards, computers, and full-size tablets, the obvious trade-off for that visual consistency is that StarWalk Kids titles aren’t as easily viewed on smaller devices like smartphones as reflowable text ebooks would be.

It’s also worth noting that non-subscribers can buy many StarWalk Kids titles à la carte to enjoy on Kindle Fire and Nook tablet models.

For more information about StarWalk Kids and to sign up for a free trial, visit www.StarWalkKids.com.

Screenshot from Rosen Interactive Ebooks.

Rosen Digital has introduced a free, interactive ebook platform that customers can populate, à la carte, with unlimited, simultaneous access licensed, nonfiction titles for $34.95 each or $209.70 for a set of six.Sixty titles are currently available and an additional 60 will be released in January 2013.

The ebooks feature colorful designs, eye-popping photographs, plenty of maps, charts and sidebars—and even video clips. And they’re perfect for individual use or classroom sharing via an interactive whiteboard. Young learners can explore the ebooks at their own pace, reading selections independently or choosing to listen to them read by a professional narrator with optional text highlighting, making them perfect for emerging and mature readers alike. While the interactive ebooks are excellent in themselves, what really distinguishes them are the instructional activities students can complete as they read the selections.

Targeting Common Core standards, which focus on reading, writing, and expressing understanding through various digital media, each ebook comes with three integrated lesson options created by Shannon Miller, a district teacher librarian and technology specialist at Van Meter (IA) Community School.

In one ebook series called “Speed Machines,” for example, students reading the title Alfa Romeo can be asked to summarize the main ideas by writing an email expressing their opinion, designing an informative Web page, or introducing the sports car company in a social network profile. If they choose to do the latter, they won’t be posting to Facebook. Instead, each dual-page view has an “activity assistant” workspace above it, which prompts students to do things—generally based on their understanding of the two pages of content. Students who opt to create a social network profile select a username above one two-page spread, then choose a profile picture from a set of Alfa Romeo images that pop up, and so on. Then they gradually complete their mock-profile learning activity as they read and write in an environment that’s safe, self-contained, and doesn’t require students to set up individual accounts. Same deal with blogs, wikis, Web pages, and other activities: students learn about publishing in various digital media through simulations that can only be printed or emailed.

On the other hand, the printable lesson plans for each learning activity do suggest extension activities that employ third-party sites, including Fakebook (A Facebook-like profile creation site for educational use), Wikispaces, and Club Penguin—activities that the publisher suggests be done with adult supervision. While Rosen Interactive ebooks currently serve grades K–6, Miriam Gilbert, director of Rosen Digital, says that titles for secondary students are coming. While Rosen Interactive ebooks are currently formatted in non-reflowable text and viewable in a Flash-based reader best suited for full-size desktops and laptops, Gilbert says an HTML5-based reader is also in the works, which will enable the ebooks to be used on a wider variety of devices.

If you’re interested in a product that supports both traditional literacy and information literacy, you can learn more by visiting rosendigital.com, where you can watch a demo and view sample interactive ebooks.

Looking for a fresh way to create rich educational presentations? Meograph helps users create and share uniquely dynamic interactive projects, incorporating Google Maps and Google Earth to generate a story time line, which can be enhanced with images, video clips, text, audio narration, and links for more in-depth information.

Currently in an early Beta release, Meograph is already a promising way for educators to fashion presentations on any topic where a visual grasp of time and place is central to understanding, making it especially suitable for social studies/history content.

Creating a Meograph presentation is totally intuitive. The Web-based program asks users to answer three basic questions: What happened, when did it happen, and where? It then automatically plots that information on a time line and presents it in chronological order via the viewer’s choice of Google Maps or Google Earth (download required), flying around the globe, displaying where each event took place in time. Creators can add still images or up to 15 seconds of any YouTube video to enhance their story, and record up to 10 seconds of narration from within the browser. To add longer narration, you can record using a third-party app such as Audacity and import the MP3 file. Viewers can elect to watch Meographs in chronological fashion or select points on the time line, hop around, and click “See More” links to further explore a topic.

While the following topic may not be your cup of tea, I chose to get my feet wet with Meograph by creating a presentation on the early roots of punk rock. Electing to begin in 1964—with the formation of the proto-punk band the MC5 in the suburbs of Detroit—I soon had Meograph whizzing over to New York City in the mid 70s, then jetting to London to illustrate how the musical movement cross-pollinated within the next decade and a half, peppering my presentation with band images and album art, plus short concert snippets via YouTube (see video below). Just three weeks old when I tried the application, Meograph enabled me to open a chat window and get prompt responses to my questions and also to provide feedback that, the company says, will inform rapid updates to the new service. Indeed, Meograph seems genuinely eager to hear from early-adopting educators like us.

So you should definitely play with Meograph. It could become a great presentation and project tool that would sure beat static PowerPoints (groan) or, even worse, poster projects (really, just shoot me) as a 21st-century assessment. Sure, thinking in four dimensions (facts, multimedia, interactivity, and context) is tricky, so Meograph is something that may have to be seen to be fully understood and appreciated. That’s why I recommend that you check out a polished sample presentation at meograph.com/demo.

Educators can use Meograph to create presentations that are perfect for sharing on interactive whiteboards, across social networks, or embedded in websites. Easy enough to use, Meograph could also be assigned to secondary students as a medium for research-project assessments in a cutting-edge, Web-based format that combines the viral appeal of both video and infographics in a modern mashup that teens are sure to get excited about.

To create an ebook or app in Aerbook Maker, start in the users’ dashboard, where you can upload an imprint logo. Next, set the project’s dimensions and orientation from a drop-down menu that makes selection easy with presets currently available for Kindle Fire, iPad, iPhone, iPhone retina display, and Instabook for Instagram. Alternatively, a user can create a project in any custom dimensions they choose. A cover can be added as well as titles and author names. Blank projects start out with a single page in the editor and authors can add images, text, video or audio, repositioning and resizing items and tweaking designs on the fly, with all project changes saved to the cloud. Pages can be saved as templates, too, making it easy to reuse page layouts—a feature that school librarians and teachers could tap into to make it easier for younger students to create picture books.

More sophisticated students can add depth, motion, and interactivity to their ebooks by adding “behaviors”—actions that happen when readers click on them—to any project element. Behaviors include internal links for jumping—hypercard-style—to another page within the book or external links for opening Web pages; playing an audio or video file; or revealing or hiding a page layer. Authors can also add parallax animation, a simple technique that simulates depth by making page elements move at assigned speeds, depending on how “far” they are designated to be from the viewer.

Authors can also elect to share parts of their books on the Web and across social networks for feedback and collaboration, another advantage of cloud-based creation. Once a version of an ebook is deemed complete, you can export it as a downloadable file that can be made available for free or for sale on a private website, or submitted to Amazon or Apple. Soon, Aerbook promises to offer a direct channel for selling DRM-free iBooks directly to customers, all from the Aerbook dashboard.

Still brand new, Aerbook Maker is already pretty cool stuff. I was able to create a basic ebook and export it in a couple of different file formats within an hour. Creating apps is undeniably trickier: they’re exported in Corona format, which requires developers to have a copy of the free Corona SDK to view it in a simulator and build it for distribution. While that may sound daunting, it’s worth remembering that an eighth grader created Bubble Ball, one of the most popular iPhone apps ever, so we might think twice before selling our students short. Plus, Aerbook promises to further streamline and simplify app development, too, eventually offering a complete Web-based app-building and distribution service.

Since many of us still have a couple weeks left before school resumes, the time to sign up for a free account and experiment with Aerbook is now. If you have any ideas about unique ways to use the product in education, or if you’d like to try piloting Aerbook Maker in your school, you’re invited to contact the company at aerbookmaker@aerbook.com.

Scholastic has a slick and promising ereader platform called Storia in soft launch and they’re preparing to go big with it this fall. It’s already available for Windows PCs and as an iPad app, and an Android tablet version should be ready by the first bell of the upcoming school year, according to the company. Storia is free to install and comes with five free ebooks. You might want to check it out now so you can talk to parents about it—perhaps at your next Scholastic book fair.

Though Storia could easily evolve into a platform that’s perfect for classrooms and school libraries, right now it’s all about families. Parents can control a dashboard that lets them set up separate, age-appropriate bookshelves for each of their children and stock them with the Scholastic titles they choose to purchase. Parents can then pop into Storia and monitor their kids’ reading progress, peeking at stats on how long their kids have spent reading, how many pages they’ve turned, and how many new words they’ve learned by looking up definitions in Storia’s excellent illustrated, talking dictionary. Storia also provides young readers with interest/reading level-appropriate suggestions for further reading that kids can add to their wish lists, providing parents with hints on what to buy next in order to keep their children’s reading habits well fed.

Scholastic expects 2,500 ebooks to be available by Storia’s official launch in the fall, with thousands more on their way in subsequent school years. Storia ebooks are basically digital replicas of their print counterparts, so illustrations and thoughtful book- design features don’t lose anything in translation. Digital titles are priced similarly to Scholastic’s paperbacks. Storia titles load quickly; look splendid; can be highlighted and annotated; rated and reviewed, and, once downloaded, can be read online or off.

Among those 2,500 titles available this fall, about 400 of them will be what Scholastic calls “enriched ebooks,” featuring recorded, natural-voice narration—making them perfect for emerging readers and children with reading deficits or visual impairments. Enhanced ebooks also offer tons of opportunities for reading-related interactivity; there are elective word scramble games based on a given title’s vocabulary, for example, and quizzes based on plots and characters. There’s even a drawing tool that invites kids to create their own illustrative interpretations of what they’ve just read. These interactive features are indicated by little lightning bolts beneath the pages, which kids can choose to open or ignore as they read. Parents have a say in that, too: they can opt to turn narration and interactivity off if they feel they’re counterproductive or distracting to the reading experience.

Kids will like the way their Storia bookshelf grows and changes with them. For example, older children get more grown-up interface choices, with smaller controls and more sophisticated design and color options. But readers of all ages can easily change their bookshelf’s color scheme and design as often as their shifting tastes dictate.

This excellent ereader platform will help families foster a love of reading in this digital age. I look forward to watching Storia grow and evolve to become as useful and enjoyable in kids’ classrooms as it is bound to be in their bedrooms.

For more information or to download Storia, visit scholastic.com/storia.

Mackin told me that its next big step in this frenzied evolution will be the release of a proprietary ereader “sometime next fall.” Until then, it has another interesting approach to hook customers: Mackin VIA. A free econtent platform, Mackin VIA serves as a single hub, providing access to all of the unlimited, simultaneous access ebooks and database content that its school libraries have purchased through the company—all through one unique URL that’s just a click away. That consolidation eliminates the need for users to log in to each discrete resource. Plus, since the majority of Mackin’s simultaneous access ebooks are nonfiction, students doing research can search their school library’s ebooks and databases at the same time. I like that, and so will classroom teachers, who are increasingly intent on the informational reading and research standards of the Common Core.

Access to Mackin VIA content is online only, so ebooks can’t be downloaded for offline reading. There is, however, a feature called “My Backpack” into which students and teachers can toss their favorite titles for quick access when they’re connected. Librarians can also post “Groups,” shelves full of titles preselected to meet students’ needs.

Since all the content within VIA is licensed for unlimited, simultaneous access, everything is available 24/7; that means no holds and no waiting for titles to be virtually checked in.

Though Mackin VIA helps put a school library’s econtent in a single, customizable place—attractively browsable by category and searchable by title, author, subject, genre, interest and grade level, and lots more categories—VIA doesn’t rely on a single ereader interface to deliver ebooks. Instead, Mackin VIA opens ebooks in the ereaders its publishers provide.

The upside of that is obvious: interactive titles from publishers like TumbleBooks and Capstone Interactive Library, for example, open up in interfaces tailor-made for their advanced features like audio narration and autoplay.

The downside of such interface diversity is that functionality across devices is inconsistent. For example, while all the ereaders work well on conventional Windows desktops and laptops, try moving onto other devices and things get dicier. Some interactive ereaders employ Flash, for instance, rendering them useless on iOS devices, while others sport controls that work well with a mouse, but are just too cramped to tap through on a tablet. It’s also worth noting that, while Mackin bills VIA as “mobile friendly,” it’s really not. VIA isn’t available as a mobile app and was very frustrating to try and use on my iPhone’s browser. Plus, the text on most of the content isn’t reflowable or scalable, so most ebooks are all but unreadable on small screens.

Mackin’s ebook pricing varies, but many of the titles fall within the $30–$50 range—not bad for unlimited, simultaneous access. Though most of Mackin’s ebooks are yours to share forever, a few publishers, like TumbleBooks and Sesame Street, require annual subscription renewals.

No pre-K–12 vendor comes close to delivering school library econtent in the singular and seamless, device-agnostic way I feel is long overdue. But the one-stop convenience of VIA is definitely a great step forward in that evolution.