Textbooks
How the Schoolbook Became Standard
For most of the history of formal teaching, the book belonged to the teacher.
Front Page · All departments
Complete listing
Story Index
Every piece in this edition, filed under Textbooks, Libraries, Digital Reading and Literacy, in signature order.
Textbooks
How the book that a class works from is chosen, printed, priced and replaced.
Textbooks
The Hornbook and the First Classroom Page
Before there were schoolbooks there was the hornbook, and it is worth looking at closely because it is the smallest complete teaching object anyone has designed.
Textbooks
Graded Readers and the Idea of a Series
The graded reader is such an ordinary object that its central idea is easy to miss.
Libraries
Reading rooms, catalogues and the long argument about who a collection is for.
Libraries
Public Libraries and the Reading Room
A public library is now understood mainly as a place that lends. Historically the lending was the late addition.
Libraries
The School Library Catalogue
The catalogue card is a small masterpiece of information design, and it is easiest to appreciate by asking what it had to do.
Libraries
Marginalia and the Second-Hand Textbook
A textbook that has passed through several owners carries a second text written in pencil, and that second text is frequently more informative about the teaching than the printed one.
Digital Reading
Files, formats and scanning: what changes when the page stops being paper.
Digital Reading
What an EPUB File Actually Is
An electronic book is often described as if it were a scanned book, which leads to a great deal of confusion about why it behaves the way it does.
Digital Reading
From Microfilm to the Scanned Page
Large-scale copying of printed material for preservation and access is older than computing.
Digital Reading
The Open Textbook Idea
The open textbook proposal is simple to state.
Literacy
Reading aloud, cheap editions and the lists that decide what gets read.
Literacy
Reading Aloud and the Recorded Book
Silent private reading is a comparatively recent default.
Literacy
What a Reading List Is For
A reading list looks like an administrative document and functions as a definition.
Literacy
The Paperback and the Cheap Edition
The cheap edition is one of the few genuinely democratising devices in publishing, and its mechanics are worth understanding because they explain both what it achieved and what it could not.