Publishers Weekly - News & Trends on 60+ Readers

Book publishers are making changes to large print books and e-Readers in response to the huge number of age 60+ Baby Boomers entering the market. According to a Publishers' Weekly article on "Seeing the Big Picture", Baby Boomers account for 78 million or a fourth of America's population. Here are some changes that are happening:

• Type size will increase from the traditional 11 font size to 14 font size (not the 16 font size of Large Print books).
• More publishers will release the larger print books versions at the same time as the standard books, thanks to technology that makes this easier.
• E-Books and other new digital readers have not yet impacted the bottom line of large-print publishers, but it is just a matter of time.
  

SkillfulSenior - A Typing Tutorial for Seniors

A Los Angeles Unified School District teacher librarian recommended a free, online touch typing tutorial by Sense-Lang. There are tutorials and games. It is available in 17 languages. This should be useful for San Mateo's diverse community.

Sense-Lang also includes a typing tutorial especially for older adults called Skillful Seniors.

There is a practice session on using a MOUSE.
There is another practice for using ARROWS.
Start with ERGONOMICS lesson to meet the instructor... enjoy!

ElderGadget - a website on Products with Elder-Friendly Features

The San Francisco Chronicle carried an article about how the Apple iPad was popular with seniors. Chronicle staff reporter Ryan Kim wrote "IPAD Appears to be Clicking With Seniors".

The article also referenced ElderGadget, a useful website that carries news and reviews of products that have "elder-friendly" features. See http://www.eldergadget.com/ Product categories reviewed by ElderGadget include about a hundred products beyond computer and other technology products. Check it out.

[Note: Remember to refer to the online tutorial "Discovering Assistive Technology" because the tutorial's links are updated as new user-friendly products become available.]

All My Faves: A Visual Display of Favorite Sites

Do you have a list of favorite websites that you visit regularly or keep track of in your "favorites", "bookmarks", or "delicious"? Well, here is a fun and useful site that visually displays best sites for everything under the sun. Click on All My Faves (subtitled: Why Search?) is a list of lists, displayed by logos.

Along the LEFT side is a list of topics such as:

• Topics of the Day (Mother's Day)
• e-mail
• video
• maps
• search
• news
• weather

(plus about 50 more categories)
Explore the topic on "Seniors" -- http://www.allmyfaves.com/Seniors

ACROSS the page next to each topic are no words, just the logo or icon for top sites. For example, after "e-mail" is the logo for Yahoo! mail -- Gmail -- MSN Hotmail -- AOL -- and many more