EduKindle

Following Len Edgerly’s podcast last week of his interview with “Starbuck,” the Kindle-toting Army Captain serving in Iraq, I thought I would grab a copy of a book he recommended during the interview, T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I mean, the book was written a looong time ago so I figured that Project Gutenberg would be able to set me up with a copy I could easily transfer to my Kindle.

To my surprise, I discovered that doing so, might very well be illegal.

My consternation comes from the fact that the book is freely available over the Internet from Gutenberg — Gutenberg of Austalia, that is. It seems that the copyright on this recommended book ran out a while ago in other (and what I consider like-minded) parts of the world, such as the UK. And there sits the file, like that big, juicy goose in the window of the Poultry Shop to which Tiny Tim has hopelessly pressed his nose. These files are even linked on American servers, surrounded by ominous sounding messages like: “Warning! Restricted Access!” (in a very large font size, no less). I am truly the child in the toy store, and may look, but not touch.

To further complicate matters, I notice that Seven Pillars of Wisdom was originally published in 1922 (the so-called “1922 Edition” or the “Oxford Text” of Seven Pillars). Heck, one of the tags for this book at Wikipedia is “Books of 1922.” Next, when I look at a very authoritative-seeming site at Cornell University that charts out when certain kinds of works enter the public domain, I read that works by foreign authors published in foreign countries “Before 1923″ are to be considered “In the public domain” in the U.S.

So what gives?

Perhaps one of you EduKindlers can help with a comment clarifying the status of Seven Pillars for us all. Until then, I will just keep my nose pressed against the barrier beyond which I can see that plump Seven Pillars file, tempting me grievously to grab it and run.

[Note: in exploring this issue a bit further, I was surprised to find two different versions of the book in Kindle versions at the Kindle Store, both for the kind of low price that one would expect from a publisher who has taken a public domain text, formatted it for the Kindle, and put up for sale through the Amazon Digital Text Platform. Perhaps someone can 'splain this phenomenon to me as well... HELP!!!]

The little saga that results in this post began early Saturday morning when the Whispernet on my Kindle silently delivered my Wall Street Journal to the door. I especially love reading the Weekend Journal, with its eclectic collection of articles on topics ranging from shashimi to secret agents. Plus, where else can I find recommendations for decent wine that’s less than $10 a bottle?

This Saturday, there was also an article about G. K. Chesterton entitled “A Century of Thursdays.” The author, Allen Barra, celebrates the enduring influence of a writer who was, at best, for many of us, a section of reading in a college Brit Lit textbook, and a small section at that.

Barra certainly caught my attention when he noted that Chesterton was “quoted freely” during the campaign by Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, and that President-elect Obama’s followers “claim to see the influence of Chesterton’s thought on [his] worldview.”

But I really sat up when Barra describes the work that is arguably Chesterton’s most well-known, the novella The Man Who Was Thursday:

Set in a surrealistic London of shadowy, labyrinthine streets, the plot is populated by poets posing as undercover policemen and policemen pretending to be anarchists. This may sound slapstick, but “The Man Who Was Thursday” presages the dark clouds gathering over Europe before World War I.

An air of impending dread pervades the novel; the term “anarchist,” after all, stirred the fear 100 years ago that “terrorist” does today.

Sounds interesting. So I got to wondering if this classic is available on the Kindle–I mean, that’s where I discovered it. And indeed it is, put in the Kindle store by publishers of the print edition and others. If you browse for it, you will find a price point that you’ll like.

As you can tell from the Downloads page, though, I have taken an interest in getting texts formatted well for the Kindle, and so I have attempted a version of Chesterton’s classic. It is done in Mobipocket format, which doesn’t seem to offer all the bells and whistles of an AZW file, but what the heck? This one is free…;-)

The popularity of Notepad for Kindle got me thinking about another utility that I’d like on my Kindle, a calendar utility.

With Notepad getting decent reviews, I thought, why not?. Mary Krieg wrote a comment, saying “I now have the Personal Notepad on my Kindle. It is fantastic! You truly designed a program that is both simple to use and yet so practical. Thank you!” And then Steve Shaw, who runs the Kindlelicious blog, wrote: “What a great idea! Thanks for posting this.” Kinda heady praise for a piker like me.

Len Edgerly called Notepad “the first Kindle Utility” in the “Tech Tip” portion of his weekly podcast at The Kindle Chronicles. Hmm, I thought, pretty cool.

A little further thought and Calendar for Kindle was born. This one took a little longer to create–multiple pages with a Table of Contents, a list of major dates for the year, and a “personal calendar” page, based on the format I created with Notepad–so I put Calendar up for sale at Amazon for $1.99 (my take: seventy cents per). Then I also realized that a user could keep their personal dates from year to year by saving the .mbp file locally before installing the new calendar for the following year. Cool beans.

So I offer it to friends at EduKindle for free on the Downloads page. Please leave a comment if you have an idea to add or a feature to request. Enjoy!

If you get up on Christmas morning and take a little peek at the computer just to see what’s going on, who’s on Twitter, if there are greetings on Facebook, or a message in a “tweetwrapper” just for you, then you should be rewarded with something more than a piece of coal.

And so it is that if you meander on over to the Downloads page, you will find a little something for your Kindle that documents a special Christmas morning from many years ago, by one of the greatest authors to ever live.

May your holidays be bright!

One interesting feature of the Kindle loaner program at North Carolina State University is the way that books are selected for download to the 18 Kindles that are available for checkout. Patrons (including students and faculty) recommend titles through an online submission form (see screen shot) that is then vetted by library staff. More from the interview:

EduKindle: How are title requests submitted and processed?

NCSU: The collection of titles on our Kindles is totally patron driven. Patrons request titles and we purchase them and download them to the unit. This has resulted in a collection of mostly popular titles, although we also have the occasional reference work, such as the Handbook of Wood Chemistry and Wood Composites. It’s not all pop-fiction like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Twilight, but also serious non-fiction authors like Thomas L. Friedman, Fareed Zakaria and Michael Pollan.

You can view our Kindle Request Page here. When patrons click the ‘Submit’ button an email is generated with the data and sent to a handful of people who have authorization to purchase titles and prepare units for circulation. Patrons have to authenticate with their NCSU id and password to get to this page. They enter name and email and the titleauthor of the book they want. Clicking the ‘Add Another…’ button gives additional title/author boxes so several titles can be requested at once. A space for comments is a ‘just-in-case’ kinda thing, such as a patron wishing to clarify their priority order of texts. Just below the patron email field is the pickup location. In addition to D.H.Hill Library on the main campus, we have 4 branch library locations. We manage the Kindles centrally, but we’ll courier a unit to a patron at a branch library so they can pick it up at their own location.

The aforementioned form-generated email of the request is handled primarily by one person in my department. In her absence I’ll handle it, and at times when neither she nor I are present a progression of ‘next-in-line’ folks step up. This gives us coverage of Kindle requests for about 20 hours a day.

We have limited the Kindle content to books for now. We will at some point experiment with newspapers and magazines, but issues with simultaneously keeping that content current and our accounts secure have kept that expansion on the back burner for now.

EduKindle: Who manages the pool of books?

NCSU: It takes a village’ to manage the pool of titles purchased for our Kindles. Amazon notifies us of each title purchased by sending an email to a listserv we’ve created with folks from Acquisitions, Collection Management, Cataloging Metadata, and Research and Information Services (my department). Acquisitions set up the Amazon accounts we use to purchase titles, and they keep track of the money spent. (Their attention to detail allowed one Acquisitions staffer to catch a mistake Amazon made that allowed us to purchase accidentally a title twice on the same account, something that shouldn’t be possible. We got our money back!) Catalogers enter purchased titles into our OPAC. A collection manager keeps track of data such as how often a title purchased for the Kindle exists in our physical collection, whether a physical copy of a text is checked out when the Kindle version is purchased, and which of our Kindles hold which texts.

This process reminds me of the Kindles that Kathy Schrock describes in her school library from a post she made in June:

We have just purchased two Kindles for our high school library as a pilot, and I found out a couple of things. First, you can have up to 6 Kindles tied to one Amazon account, and, if you buy a single title, you are allowed to put it on all 6 of them.

Secondly, 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.

These models show us the value of a reading device that can hold many titles, and that can involve students actively in building the library’s collection. It is kind of a “suggestion box 2.0″ for schools. And the fact that the titles you purchase can be downloaded to six different Kindles means that student choice and self-determination as readers is enhanced.

Cool beans.

Next time: What are the lessons learned at NCSU for Kindle loaner programs?

I heard about the Kindle loan program at NCSU through one of my diligent Twitter buddies and got in contact with David DeFoor from the Learning Commons at the University. When I asked David a few questions, he told me to write them down because the involvement in the program crosses several units. David was very kind in collecting the answers for EduKindle. Here is the first part of our exchange.

EduKindle: Have you had any issues with durability on the loaner Kindles?

NCSU: No durability or quality issues at all. The software running the Kindle must be fairly robust as well, as we’ve had very few problems with lockups or crashes. Only 2 or 3 times over 8 months have I had to resort to the ‘paperclip in the hole’ reset remedy, and that among 18 units. We were somewhat surprised by the Kindle’s physical durability. The plastic case and light weight contrast with the metal case and heft of our two Sony Readers. We figured the Sony was more rugged and braced ourselves for cracked Kindle cases. It hasn’t happened. The program is, of course, still nascent, so quality issues may arise in time. We’ll know more in May after we’ve been circulating them for a year.

This is quite impressive to me, but maybe not unexpected, given all of the equipment that David’s group has experience loaning to patrons, which includes everything from laptops to voice recorders to GPS units. And it sounds like these items circulate pretty widely.

EduKindle: Who uses the Kindles (i.e. what are your user demographics)?

NCSU: We’ve been loaning Kindles to a wide cross-section of faculty, staff, grad students, and undergrads, but we can’t currently extract and share the percentages of each group served. Anecdotally I can attest to broad diversity among our patrons.

Here is a good early indicator about the basic durability of the Kindle for use in schools. If they have only used the paper clip solution two or three times in the past eight months, they are doing better than I am, on a per Kindle basis, by a long shot!

Coming next: How do members of the NCSU community select content to be installed on the Kindle?

If you are like me, your pocket is full of little notes and reminders written on tiny, crumpled slips of paper. With the full keyboard, I always wondered why the Kindle did not provide for personal notetaking as part of the basic set up.

In order to solve my problem, I thought I would just convert and upload a singe page document and then keep my notes on the Kindle. Then I could view them in “My Notes and Marks” from the document menu using the scroll bar clicker, or save them to my computer through the “My Clippings” file that is kept as a text file on the Kindle itself.

Next, interested as I am in how documents can be properly formatted for the Kindle, or “Kindle Optimized,” I decided to create a document that could help keep my notes organized. What I came up with is the “notepad” document. Once it is loaded on your Kindle, this is what the screen will look like:

On this one, I have made one note, and you can see the little “note” icon next to the Note #1 text highlighted. When you click the menu and select “My Notes and Marks,” you will see the notes listed in order. You can also view (and edit) the note by selecting it with the scroll wheel; if you access your note this way, you will also be given the option to delete it.

Of course, editing or deleting a note will not affect the text of the Notepad document itself.

Nifty, huh? I have included this document for free download on the Downloads page.

Enjoy!

I have been working on getting texts properly formatted for the Kindle lately and thought I would experiment with short articles on topics of interest to educators. The first ones are now available on the “Downloads” page. One is a brief overview of the NCLB legislation that was sourced through Wikipedia, and another is the text of a press release about Secretary Margaret Spellings and her final regulations for the implementation of NCLB.

Of interest to Kindle afficionados is the fact that the first article was formatted, with great labor and perseverance, through Amazon’s “free” email formatting service. It was tough to get the HTML just right so that Amazon would accept it, and, as you will see, the formatting is pretty basic at that. I will see about going back and linking the endnotes, for example.

The second file is an “ebook” or Mobipocket file. This one was much easier to produce as the Mobipocket Creator (free download here) converts from a text file pretty easily. A little light HTML coding to get the headers right, and it is ready to go. Looks great on the Kindle, and will work on other ebook readers as well.

A shout out and special thanks for helping me with this process goes to Joshua Tallent at KindleFormatting. Joshua is an ebook formatting veteran, and he can get these files running smooth as silk on the Kindle. I look forward to learning more from Joshua and recomment his formatting service highly.