Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Advantages and disadvantages of e-book

When we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of e-book, we can find that there are numberous advantages or benefits of e-book. However, e-book is as same as the other technology that always has pros and cons. So these are some brief of advantages and disadvantages of e-book.

Advantages of e-book
1. E-books can contain not only text and images, but also audio and even video. Moreover, some e-books even have flash applications that allow the reader to interact with the contents. Or in other words, e-books have multimedia format.
2. There is no need to ship any physical product halfway around the globe, because we can simple download e-books from the web. Therefore, there is no shipping cost for e-books.
3. Many e-books sport a search button, which allows the readers to quickly jump to the page containing the word they are interested in. So e-books' searchable make this type of book look more interesting.
4. E-books are easy to be updated. Because e-books are the electronic documents so the author can edit and save the updated version and then informs customers about the new release more easily. This means e-books are low updated cost books.

Disadvantages of e-book
1. It is painful to read off a screen, and if that e-book is quite long, printing cost will be more expensive for some people who prefer to read text on paper.
2. It is easy to be piracy. Because e-books are the electronic files so they can be emailed or sent to someone in the other places more easily.
3. It is not convenient to read. Because readers have to sit in front of their computers for hour when they want to read this type of book by using computer, but with printed books, readers can easily read even while standing.

My Reflection on Blogging
Since this course is online course and blogs are one of the important technology tools for this type of learning. I really agree that blogs are the good way for individuals to reflect on what we are learning and to get feedback from other people. There are many advantages I received from blogging.

Firstly, it gave me a chance to write what I learnt for sharing. According to this, knowing in depth what I wanted to publish is very necessary. This event helped me learnt more how to analyse and synthesize the information I studied to write in my blog. Secondly, comments from the other people helped me knew what my weakness, what my strength and what to do better. More importantly, they gave me more visions about what I wrote. Thirdly, commenting on others' blogs made me learn in depth the knowledge that I wanted to comment, because good comments can be occured when the commentator really understands what bloggers post. Therefore, I learnt more knowledge by this way.

Finally, blogging gave me a chance to communicate and exchange my point of view with the other people that helped to promote a learning community outside the classroom. In my opinion, I really agree that this technology tool is appropriate to use in this online learning course because it can help learners to improve their critical thinking indeed.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Finding free e-books

There are some places that we can find free e-books which can be downloaded in various formats and converted if necessary. These are some examples places to find free e-books.

1. FreeBookSpot (http://www.freebookspot.com/): is an online source for free e-books download with 4485 free e-books in 96 categories like scientific, engineering, programming, fiction and many other books.

2.
4eBooks (http://4ebooks.org/): has a huge collection of computer programming e-books, field like .Net, Actionscript, Ajax, Apache and etc.

3.
Free-eBooks (http://www.free-ebooks.net/): is an online source for free e-books download, e-book resources and e-book authors. Besides, free magazines also can be download.

4.
ManyBooks (http://manybooks.net/): provides free e-books for PDA, iPod or eBook Reader. There are 21,282 free e-books available here.

5.
GetFreeEBooks (http://www.getfreeebooks.com/): is a free e-books site that provides all legal free e-books to download.

6.
FreeComputerBooks (http://freecomputerbooks.com): consists of a huge collection of free online Computer, Programming, Mathematics, Technical Books, Lecture Notes and Tutorials. In addition, it is very well categorized by topics, with 12 top level categories, and over 150 sub-categories.

7.
FreeTechBooks (http://www.freetechbooks.com/): lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet.

8.
Scribd (http://www.scribd.com/): the online document sharing site which supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and other popular formats.

9.
Globusz (http://www.globusz.com/): is a unique ePublishing house, specializing in free e-book downloads. They also provide an excellent Star Rating Showcase for new and evolving authors.

10.
KnowFree (http://knowfree.net/): is a web portal where users are able to exchange freely e-books, video training and other materials for educational purposes and self-practice.

In addition, there are the other places to find free e-books, they can be found in the refference below.