EduKindle

For all the users of Kindlepedia over the past year, I am delighted to announce that, in partnership with Joshua Tallent and the “talented” folks at eBook Architects, we are launching a new Kindle content tool called eReadUps. Like Kindlepedia, eReadUps builds Kindle-formatted books based on articles from the largest open source provider of information on the planet, Wikipedia.

But eReadUps goes farther, a lot farther.

At eReadUps, you can build multi-article books using the first few results from Wikipedia for free, always. And once we emerge from the “beta” period in a few weeks, you will be able to sign up for a premium membership and enjoy many other features that the site has to offer, like:

1. Access to every every source on our growing list
2. Ability to build eReadUps from as many articles as you like
3. Free storage for all your eReadUps in your own personal My Stuff page
4. Access to more articles in other languages
5. Choice of article format: .mobi for the Kindle and ePub for most other readers
6. A free book just for signing up, and free content every week on the site

The free book currently offered to members is Wikibooks’ extensive guide to First Aid, a handy reference to have on board for Kindle lovers.

So, if you like to grab information that interests you or that you need, get it formatted especially for the Kindle, store it online, and have the option to add it wirelessly to your Kindle library, give eReadUps a try! To request a beta code, just click on Join Now and send us your email address. We will send out invitations as they become available.

(Special thanks to Len Edgerly and the Kindle Chronicles for featuring eReadUps in the TKC Podcast #83, which also contain Len’s interview with Kindle guru Stephen Windwalker, author of the Kindle Nation blog and several books about the Kindle. Well worth a listen!)

There is interesting coverage over at Ars Technica of a recent development in the federal government’s program to support technology purchases in schools, known as the Universal Service Fund’s “E-Rate” program. Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-MA) introduced H.R. 4619 on Tuesday, called the E-Rate 2.0 Act. The goal is to update the “successful” E-Rate program, introduced as part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, that has resulted in 95% of American schools gaining access to the internet today. According to Congressman Markey, “with the expansion of the scope of technology, students need more than just Web access at school, and our E-Rate 2.0 bill is intended to reflect those expanded needs.” Read the complete press release here.

The new bill has three key provisions. First, the bill would instruct the FCC to initiate a pilot program to provide “vouchers to enable low-income students to purchase residential broadband service.” Second, the FCC would also initiate a pilot program to “extend funding for broadband equipment and services to selected community colleges and head start facilities.”

It is the third provision that interests us here at Edukindle. Under the bill, the FCC would initiate a pilot program that would allow applicants serving particularly low-income students to “apply for significantly discounted services and technologies for the use of e-books.” That idea could prove a tremendous boon to those schools who see a future in ebooks for their students, and who want to leverage the sustainability, the affordability, and the “update-ability” of ebooks on behalf of these children.

Leave aside the fact that the device manufacturers should already be providing educational discounts to schools, as I argued in an earlier post entitled “Should Educators Get a Discount on the Kindle?” Of course they should. And if the E-Rate 2.0 legislation becomes law, you can bet that there will be a tsunami of discounts offered by equipment makers who want to get in on the billions of dollars offered under the program. (Oh, yeah, the bill also seeks to raise the current cap of $2.25 billion on E-Rate spending to adjust for inflation.)

Where this proposed legislation gets interesting, though, is when viewed in the context of other events driving the world of education right now. In recent months, large entities like the State of California have initiated programs to support the use of “open source” texts to replace traditional textbooks in the schools in order to save money and take advantage of the growing movement to create high quality materials at no cost to the user.

Just last summer, the Democratic Leadership Council floated a proposal entitled “A Kindle in Every Backpack” (which you can download here in Kindle format), arguing in part that “the ‘Kindle in every backpack’ concept isn’t just an educational gimmick—it could improve education quality and save money.”

Bringing ebooks into classrooms effectively and pervasively, though, will require more, a lot more, than funding for devices. The state of the art right now in terms of materials that can be used right away in classrooms is pretty much limited to novels and nonfiction texts–whole books, that is, where reading from one page to the next is the required activity.

For educational texts that require charts, graphs, and images, a device like the Kindle has a long way to go, and I mean more than simply adding color. Reference works like textbooks require different chunking or configuration when they are displayed on an ereader. Anyone who has attempted to read a PDF document, even on the Kindle DX, can tell you that formatting and navigation tools are not yet up to snuff.

Don’t get me wrong. Once money starts to flow to ebook resources and devices, the marketplace will work this out. But it will involve more heavy lifting than anyone imagines.

Wandering through my local Barnes and Noble over the weekend I ran into something unusual. A Nook. For months I have been drawn to the banners and brochures near the help desk, only to learn that the helpers didn’t know when the store might have an actual Nook on display. This was a pleasant surprise.

I think that we have to view the Nook differently than we view all the other devices that are beginning to flood onto the market. First, and most importantly, the Nook is connected to an existing distribution franchise, much as the Kindle was when it hit the market in late 2007. As we learned then, connection to a bookseller with existing distribution makes all the difference to an ereader device. Otherwise, why wasn’t consumer electronics giant Sony more successful in the years before the Kindle, especially given the size of its head start in the market? First mover should have counted for something, right? Clearly now, with 20/20 hindsight, we recognize that the Kindle ushered the ebook market out of the backwaters where it had been languishing on Sony’s watch, precisely because it nestled its new reading device in the nest of one of the biggest book distribution systems on the planet. Now, Barnes and Noble, is following that lead, and stands to succeed in some measure because of it.

Second, the book distribution system in which the company is nestling its Nook is one that the public is very familiar with and comfortable with. Who else holds mind share, even awareness, for bricks-and-mortar book distribution? Borders, maybe. Books-a-Million, not so much. B. Dalton? These examples prove the point: Barnes has a head start in an arena that Amazon cannot touch, the world of real-world bookstores. You just can’t hang out in an overstuffed chair, sipping your latte, and browse through books, at Amazon.

It is an interesting side note, I think, that Barnes also recognized the importance of something that is in the DNA of any book retailer: color matters. The color touch screen at the bottom of the Nook reflects this awareness. It is more than just a way to one-up the Kindle’s feature set; the ability to display cover art, so important to the look and feel of a Barnes and Noble store–the impact of those piles of brightly-colored books on tables and racks that greet you when you walk in the store–that element of the book browsing and buying experience is incorporated into the Nook.

(During my few minutes with the Nook, that color screen was kept on a pretty tight leash by the power management software in the device and kept going dark at what seemed to be very short intervals. It wasn’t hard to wake up, but because that screen is used in lieu of physical controls, its disappearance takes all your navigation options with it, and that I found a bit unnerving.)

How will this hit the sensibilities of people in schools? Well, kids like and expect color, so that’s a plus. If Barnes is successful in getting sample devices into all its stores, I think that teachers and kids will appreciate being able to get one into their hands to see what it is like before purchasing. (Remember Amazon’s workaround for its inability to provide this kind of real world preview? It enlisted its customers to meet up with prospective customers with its “see a Kindle near you” program. Wonder how effective that was?)

Ultimately, it should (emphasis on “should”) be hard for Barnes to squander the leverage of its brand and its physical locations in competing with Amazon. It is off to a weak start by failing to learn from Amazon’s early supply problems with the Kindle. By rushing to take advantage of the recent holiday buying season, Barnes let everyone know that its Nook operation is still rough around the edges–for sure. But given the fact that they have produced a nice, tight little reading device, and that they still own a bunch of comfy chairs and latte machines to go with it, they will find a number of customers for the Nook that Amazon has yet to reach.

Anyone interested in the Kindle is surely aware of Len Edgerly’s excellent weekly podcast at The Kindle Chronicles. This past week, Len interviewed Michael Koenig, director of MBA operations at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, one of six universities across the country doing a Kindle DX pilot this year in some of their classes.

Darden has taken a very specific direction with the Kindle. It is being used in several MBA-level classes to support the school’s distinctive “case study method.” The school describes the method in this way:

Students are exposed to over 500 cases in a variety of industries and functions during their time at Darden. In each class, students contribute their own viewpoints to the business situation at hand, while building a strong frame of reference and broadened perspective from the classroom discussions. If you are able to visit a Darden class, you will see that Darden students do most of the talking.

At Darden, Koenig tells Edgerly that the Kindles are used exclusively for students to read the cases assigned for class. This pilot does not involve textbooks, a use that observers have anticipated ever since Amazon introduced the DX with its native handling of PDF files and larger screen. Rather, the Darden use seems to fall into the “sustainability” category that other university pilots are focusing on. Millions of sheets of paper are used to print supplemental reading materials like case studies for classes across the world, and one of the most promising uses of ereaders in education will address this expensive problem.

I found a couple of interesting points in the interview. First, Koenig describes the use of the Kindle’s wireless capability to  “push” the case studies onto the students’ Kindles. He notes that the lack of a folder system to organize materials on the Kindle makes navigation through the hundreds of cases students read in a year more difficult. Listing cases by date should help, but it is clear that ereader devices used for academic purposes will require some form of onboard folder system.

Koenig also makes it clear that the Kindles are relatively invisible during class time. He implies that the emphasis on lively discussion in class means that fumbling around with the five-way controller (or flipping pages for that matter) just doesn’t work. To me, this also reflects a thoughtful acceptance of the Kindle for what it can do really well–make it easy to carry and read a bunch of documents or books anywhere. In some ways, the Kindle and other ereaders suffer from a set of expectations created by other devices meant to do other things, like laptops. Where’s the color? Where’s the video? Where’s the animation?

But that’s not what the Kindle is about. As James Fallows writes in The Atlantic:

Amazon should work on making the Kindle the preferred long-form reading device for all the stuff that’s long enough that it gets tedious on computer screens and is awkward on small iPhone-type displays — texts you otherwise want in physical print (either book or printed-out document) but that aren’t so dependent on a visual experience (loaded with graphics, photos etc) that only physical print or a large, high-quality computer display will do.

This is the point that I made in an earlier post on why the Kindle may just be the “perfect learning appliance.” It won’t be doing the same things as a laptop or an iPhone anytime soon, nor should it.

Darden has it pretty much right, in my opinion. Their model comes closer to foretelling the near future of the ereader in education than anything else out there.

I recently purchased a Sony Pocket Edition Reader to see how the rest of the ereader world looks compared to my Kindle. The view from here is surprisingly good. The Pocket Edition is small, tight, handsome, and, it actually does some thing that my Kindle can’t do. Like check a book out from the library.

If you, like me, entered the ereader world through the Kindle, the idea of impulse buying has been deeply ingrained by the slick Amazon consumer model, based on instantaneous access to the most popular titles. With the discount price of no more than $9.99 per book, this system encourages the kind of anytime, anywhere buying that Amazon pioneered when it opened its online bookstore in July 1994. I personally succumbed to the Amazon system in the late 90s, and I have been a fan and customer ever since. When I saw the Kindle, I had to try it and to this day use my Kindle 1 more than any other device, including the print book, to read with.

But last night my daughter looked at my sony Pocket Edition sitting on the table and asked “Dad, is that your new favorite ereader?’ Stricken by a pang of guilt for having been caught loving an ereader more than my Kindle, I mumbled something to the effect of “Oh, for right now I am using it more.” But the truth is , maybe I do have something going on on the side with my Sony.

Aside from the sleek simplicity of the Pocket Edition, and its VERY CONVENIENT size, my current infatuation with the device has to do with its ability to do something my Kindle can’t do: borrow a book.  My public library in Southern Maryland is part of a state-wide consortium that offers ebooks and e-audiobooks for download if you have a library card from a participating library. The process is simple. I navigate to the portal through my local library’s website, log in using my library card, and search or browse the catalog. What I am looking for are books I want to read that are formatted in the EPUB format that my Sony Pocket Edition likes. When I find what I am looking for, I check the book out for 14 days using the eBook Library software that came with my Pocket Edition. The interface is like the iTunes interface, except more primitive and a little buggy at times, but very workable. Voila! I am reading a book for a couple of weeks and my credit card bill is $9.99 lighter. Does anybody think that this isn’t how it will work in the future?

What are the downsides of this arrangement? Well, my local library has all of 71 titles available in the EPUB format. The eBook Libaray software does inexplicably “do nothing” at times when I ask it to do something on my Windows XP machine, though that has only happened once and it was resolved by closing the program and reopening it. The Pocket Edition has to be cabled to my computer to make any of this happen–zero direct internet connectivity. No keyboard for notetaking on the Pocket Edition, and the bookmarks I place are only useful as long as I have the book.

But for getting a popular title for free for two weeks, having it display in different font sizes clearly and reflow properly on what I would call a state of the art e-ink screen, on a piece of consumer electronics that feels solid and fun to use and that can truly fit easily in my pocket, the Sony Pocket Edition does things that I can’t do with my Kindle.