Textbooks

PHILADELPHIA — A series of children’s textbooks on Islam contains misleading and inflammatory rhetoric about the religion, inaccurately portraying its followers as inherently violent and deserving of suspicion, according to a Muslim civil liberties group. The Pennsylvania chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations began what it calls a public awareness campaign yesterday against the “World of Islam’’ books by Mason Crest Publishing. “This is not about Muslims being offended,’’ Moein Khawaja, the chapter’s civil rights director, said at a press...

In Boston, it can seem like most of the city's population has either authored a textbook, assigned one for a course they teach, or purchased one recently. So that makes a recently filed lawsuit our city's version of Viacom v. YouTube, or the Department of Justice v. Microsoft, one of those cases that everyone in our tech- and education-oriented town will follow. Three of the largest publishers of textbooks are suing Boundless Learning, a Boston start-up trying to popularize free, Web-based textbooks.

NEW YORK - Apple Inc. launched its attempt to make the iPad a replacement for a satchel full of textbooks yesterday by starting to sell electronic versions of a handful of standard high school books. The electronic textbooks, which include "Biology" and "Environmental Science" from Pearson and "Algebra 1" and "Chemistry" from McGraw-Hill, contain videos and other interactive elements. But it's far from clear that even a company with Apple's clout will be able to reform the primary and high school textbook market.

Boundless Learning Inc. says it will liberate college students from big textbook bills with free online versions built from public Web content. But the Boston start-up is being accused of copyright infringement by three of the largest educational publishers in the world, who say it creates its texts by stealing from well-known textbooks. Boundless is "a business built on brazen infringement" that "misleads students, and has a corrosive effect on learning," according to a lawsuit filed last month in US District Court in New York.

TOKYO — Alarmed that its children are falling behind their counterparts in South Korea and Hong Kong, Japan is adding about 1,200 pages to elementary school textbooks, bringing the total across all subjects for six years from 4,900 pages today to nearly 6,100. In a move that has divided educators, Japan is going back to basics after a 10-year experiment in “pressure-free education,’’ which encouraged more application of knowledge and less rote memorization. Japan’s near-the-top rank on international standardized tests has fallen, stunning this nation where education has long...

MOSCOW -- If you can judge a book by its cover, then the "History of Russia and the World in the 20th Century" tells students that the Soviet past was all pride and glory: Three of four cover photos invoke Soviet propaganda. That goes for what's inside, too. The textbook for Russian high school seniors touts the Soviet system's achievements but treads lightly, if at all, on its failures and abuses. It is virtually mute on the deportation of ethnic groups under Josef Stalin, which left hundreds of thousands of people dead and sowed the resentment that exploded in...

Archbishop Williams seniors Michael Wang, from Beijing, and Rachel Martin, from Pembroke, use the new equipment at the school. By Jessica Bartlett, Town Correspondent Next semester, students at Archbishop Williams High School expect to have much lighter bags as the school switches from textbooks over to e-books. In an effort to expand the program, the Braintre school will give every student access to a new iPad come fall, which will be used for downloading textbooks, taking class notes, analyzing data in science labs, and...

AUSTIN, Texas -- The state Board of Education approved new health textbooks for the state's high school and middle school students yesterday after the publishers agreed to change the wording to depict marriage as the union of a man and a woman. The decision involves two of the biggest textbook publishers and represents another example of Texas exerting its market clout as the nation's second-largest buyer of textbooks. Officials say the decision could affect hundreds of thousands of books in Texas alone.

The NCAA put Nebraska on two years' probation and endorsed the school's self-imposed fine of $38,000 on Wednesday as part of an impermissible benefits case involving textbooks and school supplies. The NCAA spared Nebraska a stiffer punishment for what the Division I Committee on Infractions determined to be major violations across multiple sports over multiple years. Nebraska reported the problem and last July acknowledged that it had improperly distributed nearly $28,000 in textbooks and other school supplies to athletes from 2007-10.

Houghton Mifflin Co. is selling its college textbook unit to Cengage Learning for $750 million so it can focus on its publishing business geared to kindergarten through 12th grade, as well as trade and reference publications. Cengage, previously known as Thomson Learning, said yesterday's transaction would help broaden its education products, including textbooks and study guides. Boston-based Houghton Mifflin and Stamford, Conn.-based Cengage also said they plan to cooperate in expanding distribution of Cengage's book titles into the US market for high school advanced placement...

They see themselves in the images of Trayvon Martin that stare from television and computer screens. They relate to the sting of being "suspicious" for doing little else than just being themselves and they worry that their accommodations to the fears of others won't be enough to keep them safe - or alive. "Who's next?" wondered senior Sarah Shephard, whose sentiment was shared by her peers at New Mission High, a small Boston school tucked among colorful Victorian-style homes 1,300 miles from where Martin, an unarmed black Florida teen, was gunned down by a neighborhood watch captain...

They see themselves in the images of Trayvon Martin that stare from television and computer screens. They relate to the sting of being "suspicious" for doing little else than just being themselves and they worry that their accommodations to the fears of others won't be enough to keep them safe - or alive. "Who's next?" wondered senior Sarah Shephard, whose sentiment was shared by her peers at New Mission High, a small Boston school tucked among colorful Victorian-style homes 1,300 miles from where Martin, an unarmed black Florida teen, was gunned down by a neighborhood watch...

Archbishop Williams seniors Michael Wang, from Beijing, and Rachel Martin, from Pembroke, use the new equipment at the school. By Jessica Bartlett, Town Correspondent Next semester, students at Archbishop Williams High School expect to have much lighter bags as the school switches from textbooks over to e-books. In an effort to expand the program, the Braintre school will give every student access to a new iPad come fall, which will be used for downloading textbooks, taking class notes, analyzing data in...

The NCAA put Nebraska on two years' probation and endorsed the school's self-imposed fine of $38,000 on Wednesday as part of an impermissible benefits case involving textbooks and school supplies. The NCAA spared Nebraska a stiffer punishment for what the Division I Committee on Infractions determined to be major violations across multiple sports over multiple years. Nebraska reported the problem and last July acknowledged that it had improperly distributed nearly $28,000 in textbooks and other school supplies to athletes from...

For most of the past six months, Vicky Shen, an editor at textbook publisher Pearson Education in Boston, has been living with a secret. Just a few blocks away in the Back Bay, Bethlam Forsa, executive vice president of global product development at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Inc. was working on the same undercover project. Both were preparing electronic editions for last week's launch of an initiative from Apple Inc. to put textbooks on its iPad tablets. In a recent biography, the computer maker's cofounder Steve Jobs said the textbook business was "ripe for destruction," but it...

Apple Inc. on Thursday launched its attempt to make the iPad a replacement for a satchel full of textbooks by starting to sell electronic versions of a handful of standard high-school books. The electronic textbooks, which include "Biology" and "Environmental Science" from Pearson and "Algebra 1" and "Chemistry" from McGraw-Hill, contain videos and other interactive elements. But it's far from clear that even a company with Apple's clout will be able to reform the primary and high-school textbook market.

VAIL, Ariz. -- Students at Empire High School here started class this year with no textbooks -- but it wasn't because of a funding crisis. Instead, the school issued iBooks -- laptop computers by Apple Computer Inc. -- to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first US public schools to shun printed textbooks. School officials believe the electronic materials will get students more engaged in learning. Empire High, which opened for the first time this year, was designed specifically to have a textbook-free environment.

THE MAN OF NUMBERS: Fibonnaci’s Arithmetic Revolution By Keith Devlin Walker, 192 pp., $25 COSMIC NUMBERS: The Numbers that Define Our Universe By James D. Stein Basic, 240 pp., $25.99 THE MATHEMATICS OF LIFE By Ian Stewart Basic, 368pp., $27.99 The calculus classes I took in high school and college are distant, vague memories, vivid only when they are horrifying - a final exam with page...

NEW YORK - Apple Inc. launched its attempt to make the iPad a replacement for a satchel full of textbooks yesterday by starting to sell electronic versions of a handful of standard high school books. The electronic textbooks, which include "Biology" and "Environmental Science" from Pearson and "Algebra 1" and "Chemistry" from McGraw-Hill, contain videos and other interactive elements. But it's far from clear that even a company with Apple's clout will be able to reform the primary and high school textbook market.