Health-care professionals who use iPads and iPhones now have a new way to access interactive “e-book” versions of the Consortium for Spinal Cord Medicine’s popular Clinical Practice Guidelines.

The new free App, available at iTunes or the App Store under “Paralyzed Veterans of America,” enables users to download the e-books, which contain vital information for health-care professionals when treating individuals with spinal cord injury. The Consortium for Spinal Cord Medicine is anchored by 23 professional organizations, including Paralyzed Veterans of America.

“Information is power, and this new app to download our interactive e-books is designed as an essential tool to help empower health-care professionals in the field of spinal cord injury medicine with the detailed clinical practice information they need at just the touch of a button,” said Fred Cowell, acting director of Research and Education for Paralyzed Veterans of America, the organization that administers and provides financial support for the Consortium.

Interactive e-books titles currently available for download through the new app are the following Clinical Practice Guideline titles: Early Acute Management in Adults with Spinal Cord Injury; Preservation of Upper Limb Function Following Spinal Cord Injury; Respiratory Management Following Spinal Cord Injury; and Bladder Management for Adults with Spinal Cord Injury.

Also available for download is Paralyzed Veterans’ popular consumer self-help guide Yes, You Can! A Guide to Self-Care for Persons with Spinal Cord Injury. All of the publications contain guidance directed by the protocols developed by the Consortium for Spinal Cord Medicine.

“Through e-CPGs and e-books, vital information for clinicians is more accessible, portable and provides instant links to other related reference materials that are important to the care and treatment of patients,” said Lawrence C. Vogel, MD, chair of the Consortium.

Over the past 16 years, the Consortium and Paralyzed Veterans have produced clinical practice guidelines and companion consumer guides on the many health-care issues common to individuals with spinal cord injury, such as upper limb preservation, treatment of pressure ulcers and bladder management.

The publications are independently reviewed, science-based compendia of the latest knowledge on the care of people with spinal cord injury/dysfunction. Consumer guides are written in an accessible style with limited technical and medical language.

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Inkling is a digital textbook company started by Mat MacInnis, an American engineer graduated Harvard who worked for Apple. MacInnis writes that the company started with a vision for a better textbook which is interactive, engaging and took advantage of the opportunities afforded by new media like iPad.

But the main clue is not only to reinvent publishing or books but to reinvent the way people learn. Accordingly to this statement, MacInnis and his team came up with idea of reinventing textbook to make them more like computers. The idea predicts that new e-textbooks will be an answer to higher expectations of students to their learning tools.

Recently, Inkling released Version 2.0 of their popular iPad application. The app offers nearly 50 of the world’s most popular undergraduate, business, and medical textbooks. Features of Inkling 2.0 include study groups developed for discussion sessions anywhere with anyone, including professors, friends and experts.

There is an expert in every book who knows the information inside and out. Additionally, the reader has access to discussions and popular comments which are very helpful to grasp the concept. Often the author of the book itself gives notes and can answer questions asked within the book’s interface.

Another extension is an organizer of all your notes, highlights, bookmarks and other links that you create. It also involves notebook. The 2.0 version also includes the integration of Wikipedia and Google for in-book searching beyond the book. Moreover, there is a possibility of purchasing chapters from a textbook from $2.99 per chapter.

The biggest advantage of the Inkling textbooks is the fact that they are designed with interactivity in mind. As an example, biology and anatomy textbook include 3D rendering of bones, muscles and molecules which can be rotated to see all the details from each side. Medical students reported that Inkling’s books are smarter and more intuitive than complicated texts which are currently in use.

The subjects which are not visual, like history for instance, are still a challenge for Inkling designers who must improve to differentiate their products from competition — mainly Kno, Amazon Kindle Textbooks Rental and Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Study.

According to MacInnis, the company is approaching 100 natively-rendered e-books at the moment. MacInnis said that these books make up over 50 percent of the textbooks used in the United States of America.

However, comparing this numbers with over 100,000 books that competitive Kno has scanned for iPad, with similar social media features and basic note-taking most students who are not scientists might choose the better price. What is more, the convenience of having all their receipts from one place cannot also stay without comment.

Inkling can push out a new textbook in about 4 to 6 weeks but to deserve the fast-changing tablet-toting student, MacInnis will have to continue his mission to fix to the format of 21^st century textbook which can fulfill all learning people needs even those expectations that users are not conscious yet.

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Founder of Project Gutenberg, and the man commonly credited for making the first ebook, died September 6 in Urbana, Ill – Michael Hart was 64. Hart died in his Urbana home. The cause of death was not reported. Project Gutenberg, which Hart began in 1971, offers over 36,000 free ebooks for download to individuals’ PC, Kindle, Android, iOS and other portable devices.

The Declaration of Independence was the first ebook Hart made in 1971, the same year he started Project Gutenberg. Hart was a student at the University of Illinois at the time. Among the 300 books he typed out and posted to the internet were the Bible and the works of Homer, Shakespeare and Mark Twain, according to The Telegraph.

Today, volunteers scan works to the Project’s website which are available in more than 60 languages. The Project’s website includes an obituary which calls Hart “an ardent technologist and futurist.”

“Michael S. Hart left a major mark on the world.” The obituary said. “Access to eBooks can thus provide opportunity for increased literacy. Literacy, and the ideas contained in literature, creates opportunity.”

According to The Telegraph, when Hart was a student at the University of Illinois he was given an account with privileges to unlimited computer access at the Materials Research Laboratory. The internet was two years old at the time and was used only by academic and military researchers. Hart spend his time online downloading historic texts. He wanted to make these works accessible to the public.

By 1987 he had typed a total of 313 books. “I want a world where you can walk into a public library and get 90 per cent of the information you need copied on a disk that you don’t have to return,” Hart said at a symposium.

According to The Project’s website, Hart was frugal and resourceful man:

“Michael glided through life with many possessions and friends, but very few expenses. He used home remedies rather than seeing doctors. He fixed his own house and car. He built many computers, stereos, and other gear, often from discarded components.”

Hart will be “remembered as a dear friend, who sacrificed personal luxury to fight for literacy, and for preservation of public domain rights and resources, towards the greater good,” the obituary concluded. Hart was born in Tacoma, Washington, on March 8, 1947. He was unmarried.

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For the first time the Harry Potter books by author J.K Rowling will be sold as e-books in October of this year.  Rowling has also expressed that the series will be available in the form of audiobooks on a website called Pottermore.  The author claims to have been “hoarding” the fresh material for quite some time (BBC) and the fans, the imaginative writer says, have been an immense motivation for this means by which to reach Harry Potter material. It’s a manner in which the author trusts she can “give something back to the fans” who have propelled the series to its grand success (BBC).  With the series having sold a stunning 450 million prints around the world, the series in the form of e-books will be available in numerous languages.

With the e-books being published by Rowling’s Pottermore Publishing, the Pottermore site will become live on the very famous Harry Potter’s birthday of July 31st.

The author has revealed the material that will make its way to its new online home are “details that didn’t make it into the book”, whereas other material is “new stuff in response to things fans have asked [for] over the years” (BBC).

The site includes features that will thrust old fans and lure new fans into an online world centered on wizardry; the site will include gaming, an online store and the prospect of social networking. Those who visit the site will be intrigued by the chance to be sorted in a Hogwarts’ school different houses and shop in Diagon Alley for magical merchandise.

To help drive the online magical world forward, one million users will be chosen before the sites October opening date in order to cultivate the site.

While Rowling has expressed that she has acquired “closure” with the character of Harry and will not be creating an 8^th book, this site is sure to submerge old and new fans alike into an enchanting realm of magic (BBC).

Image Courtesy of  http://www.facebook.com/harrypottermovie

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