Sony Donates 100 Readers to Penn State Study
by Craig Morgan Teicher -- Publishers Weekly, 9/8/2008 8:02:00 AM
Sony donated 100 of its e-book readers to a year-long inituative at Penn State University that will examine e-book usage in a higher education setting. A collaboration between Penn State's University Libraries and its English dpeartment, the study will examine the use of ebooks in several contexts, including within the library, in undergraduate and graduate classes, as research tools, and as tools for people with disabilities. Five readers will be made available for monthly loan from the library and loaded with books in popular categories, such as bestselling fiction. "We want to be at the front end of this new technology and to help Sony's technology team create a product that will be useful for how our students work with literature," said Robin Schulze, head of Penn's English Department. The study seeks to find out why readers "have been resistant to reading full-length books in electronic form" in an academic setting," and "to have a much better understanding of the ways that our students and faculty will want to use eBooks," according to Mike Furlough, assistant dean of Scholarly Communications at Penn.
