Thing 20

I definitely feel more enlightened about the availability of ebooks. I was unaware that there was a site such as FriedBeef with its collection of links to ebook sites and that many titles are free. In the past, when I would stumble upon a good site, they would give excerpts for free, but you had to pay a price if you wanted the entire book. Obviously most of the free stuff has been in publication for a long time. New authors would not make much of a living if no one bought their books.
I checked out MANYBOOKS, Gutenburg Top 100, and BookYards.
I like that most of these sites have developed good user interface and a user is quickly able to find a book/publication by author, title or genre. It is also good to see that the downloads can be saved in so many different file formats (pdf, html, rtf, txt, etc.)so very important now because there are so many different display options.
The biggest learning benefit I see for this type of delivery is that many of these books have an audio component, so even if the book is a bit beyond the students reading level, they can listen as they read along, and eventually improve their reading ability. The drawbacks for me are that most of these sites are full of advertisements which I find annoying and distracting. I feel I would have to be very certain about what site I would recommend for middle school students to use outside of the NPS library system.
I could not get in to the NHS eBook collection, the username and password I wrote down in June, isn't working for me. But, I was able to access and see all the print books available at my school. I was not aware that I could do that from home.
There are art ebooks which students who are interested may read and explore art topics on their own. I would have to read them first myself, before I could recommend them. All I need is a lot of time.....