From the “this is what I’m talking about” department at EduKindle: I was reading the Weekend Journal on the Kindle (still on the free two-week Wall Street Journal trial) and saw a review of Grand Theft Auto IV by Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Junot Diaz. This guy can write: “for me, GTA IV is more an example of our evasions as a culture, more of a fairy tale, more of a story of consolation than a shattering cultural critique…” So I look for the prize-winning novel in the Kindle store, and seconds later I am reading the sample of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In a WSJ interview/feature earlier this year, Junot Diaz said something that resonates:
The point of reading was that it was an excuse to talk to other people. It was an excuse to ask questions; it was an excuse to build a community out of nothing but a strange book that two or three people happened to cross paths on.
Read the whole piece here. All in 20 minutes on the Kindle.
I love this tweet because it expresses my experience exactly:
“Started Pillars of the Earth, as a sample on Kindle. At 11:30p end of sample so without taking head off pillow downloaded rest of book WOW!” From Twitter.
What’s magical about a Kindle “sample” is that it gives you quite a bit to read, so that by the time the sample runs out, you are actually reading the book! The sample takes you past the point of no return. This is another example of the way in which the business system that Amazon has created meshes pretty neatly with the needs of the reader.
Is it the first author reading by Kindle? Hear “Cold Turkey in Paradise: Twelve Days Off the Internet in Maho Bay” read by author Len Edgerly below and read the essay itself at Wazee:
Len, how about a Kindle version so we can read it ourselves?
Here it comes, another segment of the publishing industry looking at the Kindle as a promising option. “The experimentation with Kindle comes at a time that many experts are urging university presses to try new business models,” says Inside Higher Ed. And The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It will become available this fall on the Kindle two weeks before the print version. This is another trend to watch: early access to books on the Kindle. Why wait for the presses to roll and the trucks to haul the books if you can start selling an electronic text today? Another little Kindle advantage…
Hadn’t really thought of this as a debate, but some folks say left hand and some folks say right hand, with pictures to prove it. I think you can go either way: left-handed with your thumb on the word “Amazon” or right-handed with your thumb on the word “Kindle.” That cover on the back provides a uniquely satisfying surface to grip, and I also notice that it keeps the Kindle from sliding on smooth surfaces.
Jan at The Kindle Reader has a great review on a book that educators might want to put on the Kindle right away, or maybe even share with students: Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. You can get it right now from Amazon. (Apparently the Kindle version posted at Amazon early by accident, Jan bought it and reviewed it, and then the publisher made Amazon take it down so its release would synch with the print release. Now THAT’s something that’s going to change! I doubt that it will be too long before waiting for the trucks to get to the bricks and mortar bookstore is out and quick delivery by Kindle is in. Nice comment from the author about Jan’s post.)
In any case, here’s a title for educators to slap on the Kindle for reading and reference.
If you hit scroll the select wheel up to a line on a page of text that you are reading and click it, a menu will pop up that offers the option to “Add Highlight.” When you click that selection, the Kindle will place a highlight line above the line of text you clicked on, and will ask you in a box at the top of the page to “Select the range of text to highlight.” There’s the rub. If all the text you want to highlight is visible, fine. But if the passage you want to highlight runs onto the next page, you have a problem.
Here’s the workaround. Assuming you are reading in a font size larger than #1 (my personal favorite is #4), reduce the font size to the smallest available–that will pull more text onto the active page. With any luck, you will now be able to highlight all the text you are interested in.
Otherwise, you will have to highlight each passage separately. Remember that the highlight (along with clippings) will be saved in your Clippings file in .txt format, so you can download those highlights at any time onto your PC and recombine them if necessary.
Put a new Kindle in the hand of a child already pre-downloaded with some rich literature and watch their eyes light up on the first day of school.
Will children discover a new love for reading?
All I know is that I have read about two or three times as much since I got my Kindle–it’s like I have developed a new love for reading.
The path for the Kindle in schools may be a difficult one, though, and the main problem isn’t price. The main problem will be getting educators to see the Kindle as something that enables reading and getting them to run with that concept. An earlier post talks about ways of making sure that kids can’t add material to the Kindle. I ask, is that such a bad thing? When school administrators embrace the idea that choice is a critical component in the motivation to read, we will see a big jump in the “volume and diversity” of reading that experts tell us is the key to reading gains.
Kelly is right, I think: putting the Kindle in my hands changed the process of reading for me. Will it capture the imagination of children and put a new light in their eyes for reading? Of course it will. The question is, will anyone dare?
Kathy Schrock has a great solution for the “credit card enabled” aspect of the Kindle:
…since any user of the Kindle can purchase a new title from the Kindle store from the Kindle itself, we did not know how we were going to control students from purchasing books on a whim. We are solving the problem by putting a gift certificate on the Amazon account with no other method of payment on the account. The teachers will spend the gift certificate funds to purchase a bunch of titles, so there will be no payment method available to purchase new titles by the users. We will just load the books up with the purchased titles.
This raises so many interesting questions. One, kind of interesting to be thinking of ways to keep kids from obtaining more reading material. As i have thought about all of this additional functionality that the Kindle brings, the mind of this former principal slips easily into thinking about how to “defuse” the device into something that I could give to kids. Then I think, No! Why try to reduce this deviced to something that can only be used the way I say? If there is anything true about life in the world of new media, it is that all of these potentialities can never be completely stifled, no matter how hard we try.
Why not set up one Kindle and let the kids load it up with books?
(Ed. note: Further thoughts from from Kathy Schrock: “As we do in the real library, suggestions for purchases submitted by students will be considered for the Kindle as they are for print titles in the library. I was not suggesting that the educators would control the content purchased for the Kindle. I was suggesting that, for a district that does not have a credit card and needs to carefully control spending due to limited resources, the gift certificate option would allow a designated amount of money to be spent on titles suggested by staff or students at the school.”)
