So, where exactly is the information I seek? The big difference with the Kindle/Overdrive lending system is that all the mechanics of book lending take place at the Amazon site, and that, indeed, is where the return or expiration date information resides. Just go to “Manage My Kindle” (an important page for any Kindle owner), find the book in the list that pops up (“Your Kindle Library”), noting that it is labeled with the words “public library,” and click on the little plus (+) sign next to it for book information, which includes the expiration date.

Never mind that the first time I opened this info it told me the book would be returned in, like, 1969 or something. Further trials have produced the more likely return date of October 9, 2011. So all is well in the Kindle lending world!

Oh, and in case you were wondering about the economic drivers behind this hugely expensive system, you will find a link to purchase the book conveniently located right next to the return date…

The announcement was met with a sense of anti-climax, though, as many of us rushed to our local library’s website to borrow a Kindle book, only to find that the roll-out is incomplete at this time. No mention of a Kindle title at my public library, for instance, until very late in the week.

Now that the system has propogated, though, folks like me are delighted to see the number of available titles. At my library, for instance, there are over 700 Kindle books with copies available. Wow! How far we have come in the world of e-books in such a short time! And with the Kindle books, the system is set up to allow patrons to have the books they borrow sent directly to their Kindles via wifi (but not 3G–see below). Oh, happy day! Unlike borrowing an ePub book and installing it manually on my Nook, these Kindle books will just appear once I check them out. Ahhh.

For Kindle owners, you will find that checking a Kindle book out from your public library will kick you over to the Amazon site, where you can pick the device you want the book sent to. I just downloaded the limit of four books, and the process works seamlessly. Another example of Amazon winning by offering the most user-friendly interface around.

It is funny to me, though, how developments surrounding the Kindle grab attention to a subject. I mean, before the Kindle itself came out, there had been e-books and e-readers for years, and a devoted crew of intrepid e-bookers who could read stuff on just about anything. But, to the general public, e-books were mostly a nonentity, until Kindle, which, er, kindled interest in e-reading like nothing else. Now that Kindle has turned up at the public library, everyone wants to know what it means, how borrowing works, and how it affects their library or Amazon accounts. Here are the three key facts that you need to know to use the new service:

1. Your library still has to buy books to make them available to library patrons. I read somewhere a reader questioning how many Kindle books would be available for borrowing through the public library. That number is ultimately determined by the number of books that your library purchases through Overdrive and Amazon to make available through the service. Despite all the chatter about new models for publishing and accessing books in the e-book era, the basics of how libraries operate haven’t changed. The library purchases books using its budget and then lends them out to patrons, whether in print or electronic formats. The kerfluffle that arose when Harper Collins told libraries through its distributor Overdrive that their e-books would be limited to 26 circulations was a conflict over terms, not a change in the basic economics of running a library. So, although Amazon makes hundreds of thousand of books available through its store, you will only be borrowing those that your library purchases.

2. The borrowing process is handled through your Amazon account, not through Overdrive or your library. This means, of course, that any patron with a Kindle and without and Amazon account cannot ultimately borrow books from the library. Not a bad deal for Amazon, which makes buying opportunities available during the borrowing process. Given the seamless and slick way that Amazon handles book transmission, this may be a small price to pay. Sometimes the best systems are inherently commercial. Think Apple. It is just a shift from the hardy, noncommercial independence of most public libraries.

3. The books you borrow can only be sent to your Kindle via wifi. It seems like a reasonable limitation, unless you have a Kindle that predates the inclusion of wifi on the device. Those early Kindles will have to be manually loaded–books will have to be downloaded to your computer first and dragged into the documents folder of a Kindle that has been attached via USB to the computer. Hmmm, not ideal. But it reflects Amazon’s growing reliance on wifi over 3G or Whispersync–the new Fire tablet doesn’t even have a 3G option–strictly wifi. So, for older Kindle owners (or should I say, owners of older Kindles), you have now officially caught up with with Sony and all the other devices that have supported this kind of borrowing for years.

But for all the schools that have been investing in Kindles for years, this is a wonderful development. Now the resources of the local public library can be used to augment the school’s collection when it comes to the very activity that seems to boost reading achievement more than anything else. And that secret activity is–drum roll please!–wait for it–reading. Kids who have greater access and greater choice in their reading get better at reading, sometimes really quickly. So, youth of America, obtaining a library card just took on new meaning. Go get one and borrow a book that you want to read on your Kindle today!

Amazon recognizes the problem, according to the article from Reuters: “Undifferentiated or barely differentiated versions of the same book don’t improve the customer experience,” Amazon spokeswoman Sarah Gelman wrote in a June 14 email to Reuters. “We have processes to detect and remove undifferentiated versions of books with the goal of eliminating such content from our store.”

Amazon is to be credited with policing the store to reduce this glut of public domain titles that were easy to list and sell in the past, creating really muddy results for users. Now, the problem is a glut of seemingly useful titles, not redo’s of public domain works, that seem to operate like, well, spam in their attempt to get you to read them, indeed buy them, before you discover that they are essentially advertisements or worse.

From the Reuters article:

Some of these books appear to be outright copies of other work. Earlier this year, Shayne Parkinson, a New Zealander who writes historical novels, discovered her debut “Sentence of Marriage” was on sale on Amazon under another author’s name.

The issue was initially spotted and then resolved by customers through Amazon’s British online forum.

“How did I feel? Shocked and somewhat incredulous, but at the same time, because of the way I found out, very grateful that someone had taken the trouble to let me know,” Parkinson said.

Kindle spam has been growing fast in the last six months because several online courses and, ironically, ebooks have been released that teach people how to create a Kindle book per day, according to Paul Wolfe, an Internet marketing specialist.

One tactic involves copying an ebook that has started selling well and republishing it with new titles and covers to appeal to a slightly different demographic, Wolfe explained.

This is a problem with many tentacles. The very virtues of digital text praised in these posts for over two years become vices when there is no natural way of regulating the proliferation of words. “This is why email spam has become such a problem — it costs nothing” says one expert cited in the article. “If people can put out 12 versions of a single book under different titles and authors, and at different prices, even if they sell just one or two books, they can make money.” For educators, the problems that have arisen regarding the digital distribution of term papers come from the same source. Someone once called the internet “a giant copy machine,” and here is where we see that principle at work.

So what can you do to avoid purchasing a spam book? What characteristics of spam books can you teach your students to look out for in their searches?

Piotr Kowalczyk, self-published author and blogger at eBookFriendly.com, has complied a guide to spam book identification. Here is our summary of his findings and recommendations.

First, take a close look at the title. Is  the title wordy and extensive? If the title of the book seems to be cramming as many keywords in as possible, often displaying the key search terms in all caps, you may have some spam on your hands.

Next, take a look at the author. Does the author seem to write in a variety of topics- from Italian cookbooks to auto mechanics? Authors who seem to be very thinly spread over a variety of topics may also be an indication that the book you are looking at isn’t the one you desire. One should also steer clear of e-books that have no author listed, but instead an editor.

What about the cover? A poorly designed cover that features generic font choices and pixilated images also can serve as a red flag. If the image remains poor quality once enlarged, this often indicates that this image was taken from the web.

The price of the book may also confirm your suspicions. Spam books are often priced at $ 0.99 to entice a reader to purchase the book without downloading a free sample (beware of the free sample: malicious links are often placed in the opening pages of an e-book to ensure their viewing). The price may exceed $ 0.99, but this is a common characteristic of e-book spam that one should take notice of.

Although this next tip may seem obvious, one should still make note of it: the book will often have no Reviews and Ratings, or terrible reviews. Heed these reviews!

However, do not base your decision on the seeming popularity of the text as gauged by the Amazon Bestseller Rank, since people buy these spam book unintentionally and consequently improve the spam’s popularity. When looking on Amazon’s best seller list, however, you may want to notice what categories the book is listed under (unrelated, irrelevant?), and if the text is listed under both books and Kindle Store.

Notice the product description which in cases of spam is often short, poorly written, or a random book excerpt. Look to see if there are any other versions of the e-book available (print, audio). If the e-book is spam, the e-book edition will be your only option. Check the e-book’s file size; spam books have a small file size indicating a short book.

Thanks to Piotr for this helpful analysis. Sadly, even for books, if it’s digital it can be spammed. Knowing the signs of spam-books is just another one of those 21^st-century skills you need to help your students acquire.

Why We Won’t Purchase More Kindles at The Unquiet Library by Buffy Hamilton

We’re back in The Unquiet Library this week as preplanning has begun, and I’ve been energized, excited (and a little happily exhausted) by the collaborative planning sessions I’ve been engaging in with several of our teachers as we’re planning some new units of study and lines of inquiry with students that will tie into content area standards as well as library program goals, themes, and targeted skills/processes  for learning (coming on the blog this week!).  Because some of these conversations began back in June at the end of the year, I spent the summer exploring options for expanding our eReader and eBook program (which I’ll also be blogging later this week).  I’ll elaborate in more detail soon why we are going to go with the new Barnes and Noble Nook Simple Touch for our “go to” device to integrate into instructional units of study as well as a medium for digital recreational reading, but an email I received last Thursday from Amazon Kindle Education sealed my decision.

In the email, Amazon Kindle Education wrote:

We discovered the FAQ on your Facebook post [my note:  they actually discovered the post from our LibGuides page through our library's Facebook page] and wanted you to either update the information to be in line with Amazon’s End User License Agreement with the attached setup information.  Or to remove the information on registering 6 devices per account to share digital content.

The email also pointed me to the Amazon End User License  (updated in February well after we began our Kindle program and which was never brought to my attention in subsequent phone/email conversations with Amazon Kindle Education in June 2011).  The email included a PDF attachment of a draft “Kindle Education: Setup Guide” (which reflects a real lack of an understanding of the needs of K12 schools and libraries) and then concluded with this paragraph:

Amazon recommends schools register each Kindle to a single account.  If you are looking for a library solution, we are working to include Kindle books in Overdrive.com’s offering to libraries before the end of the year.

I emailed Amazon Kindle Education to make sure that I understood:

1.  They now require a separate email for each device, and subsequently, for managing ebook content which is now 1:1 for K12.  I immediately thought of colleagues who have much larger collections of Kindle devices and Kindle books and felt astonished that Amazon could be so ignorant (or indifferent?) of how ridiculously impractical this mandate will make it for librarians to manage the those devices and content.

2.  The 1:1 rule will now be enforced for K12 and school libraries, yet the only backend management tool being offered to us is to purchase a subscription to Overdrive, which is financially impossible for most school libraries, and for my colleagues who work in elementary and some middle school settings, not a feasible solution in terms of ease of accessibility for younger readers or a selection of interactive ebooks that are more developmentally appropriate for younger learners.  I don’t have a problem with the 1:1 aspect, but I do have a problem with Amazon not providing alternatives to help libraries and schools work within the confines of the licensing agreement that is now apparently being enforced (I was told via phone that in our case, they were responding to a concern shared by a publisher who apparently saw our LibGuides Kindle pages).

In a phone conversation with my Amazon Kindle Education rep Monday, the new terms of agreement were confirmed.  While the rep stated that Amazon is working on some type of backend management tool/system, it will not be available for several months, and I got the impression it won’t be comparable to what Barnes and Noble is now offering to K12 schools/libraries.   I had already planned to go with the Nook Simple Touch for 2011-12 (again, I’ll blog why later this week), but nonetheless, it was disappointing to walk away from this series of conversations feeling as though Amazon does not seem to value the needs of the K12 market and is not being terribly responsive to our needs as institutional consumers.  While we will continue to utilize our existing fleet of ten Kindles, we certainly will not invest any additional monies in the devices or ebook content under the current limitations that really will not work for our environment.

I share this information not to “bash” a vendor, but to help colleagues have as much information as possible as they prepare to make decisions about devices and providers of ebook content in the upcoming school year.  I’ll have a post up later this week about the options we’re exploring and how we feel they will meet the needs of our students and teachers.

In a statement, the publisher justified the action by saying  “this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our authors and ensure a presence in public libraries and the communities they serve for years to come.” The number of circs was selected based on factors including the wear and tear on print books, and a library’s need to replace these copies as they wear out. Someone posted a picture of a print book that had been circulated twenty-six times. It appeared to be in pretty good shape.

So what is the upshot of this particular e-book kerfluffle? Well, the first point to be made is that now that e-books are becoming a significant part of their businesses, publishers must rethink the pricing model for the book as a digital rather than a physical item. From that perspective, the HarperCollins move is not so off-the-wall. In a recent front page story in the New York Times, Lisa Sampley, a librarian in Springfield, MO, says ““I can see their side of it.”

I’m hoping that if other publishers try to change the model, they think about the libraries and how it will affect us. But I’m sure there is some kind of model that could work for us both.

That conciliatory tone has not been matched, however, by librarians who felt “gobsmacked” by the change in policy. A website, BoycottHarperCollins.com, was established to serve as a clearing house for information about the change. Several terrific resources are linked at the site:

Bobbi Newman, at Librarian by Day, has put together a great collection of links to what librarians have written about this issue. We also recommend reading what Kate Sheehan has written about this issue at Loose Cannon Librarian.

Special Note to Kindle Owners: Of course, for now, this policy change doesn’t affect you, since the Kindle does not support library borrowing of e-books. This is convenient for Amazon, as it has its hands full battling publishers over their first salvo in the battle to control the monetization structure of e-book publishing, the imposition of the “agency model” on e-book distributors like Amazon.

HarperCollins’ move is cut from the same cloth. A digital book–a file really, a file like a music file or an image file–has different properties than a print book. So, what does it mean to “own” a digital file like an e-book? We learned a lot about that when, in an earlier e-book kerfluffle, Amazon removed improperly licensed copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm from the Kindles of people who thought they had purchased and now “owned” the book. This represents the equivalent, in the world of print books, of a company sending its hip-booted minions into your house at night to retrieve a book that it deems doesn’t belong to you any more. Ownership that can be revoked by the push of a button is a kind of ownership that feels strange and new and a little bit scary to a lot of folks.

Now, what you can’t do with an e-book is well-documented. You can’t sell it, you can barely lend it (sometimes), and you can’t read it on any old device you happen to have sitting around. Can you imagine this scene from 2025: “Dad, where is the old Kindle that your copy of Going Rogue is on?” Until the demise of DRM, something that has happened in the world of downloadable music, the publisher clearly has more control over the content than you do.

So, owning an e-book mostly means that you have paid a fee to have access to it under conditions determined by the publisher and the distributor. HarperCollins is simply asserting its control over that e-book file. For libraries, it is as though the book has become equivalent to other digital resources, like a web-database or online service that libraries already purchase on a subscription basis. You pay by the amount of access you get, and that access is not unlimited. Usually, you get access for a period of time, like a year.

So what is the kind of model that, in Lisa’s words, “could work for us both”?

Maybe the right plan for e-book lending is some kind of “metered” access to the content. I, the library, will pay for exactly as many circulations as I need, neither more nor fewer. So I don’t have to buy even twenty-six circulations for a book that is checked out twice, and I can determine just how available I want to make the bestsellers which will circulate many more than twenty-six times. The kind of agreement that Lisa Sampley is looking for would establish the cost of a circulation at a price which won’t drive publishers–or libraries–out of business. Then, publishers do well when bestsellers drive a lot of circulations, and libraries are not forced to eat the cost of books that are flops. If the e-book costs the library $9.99, then the price of a circulation is about $0.38. In a perfect digital world, such an approach would help libraries budget more accurately for materials. If every book cost $0.38 per circulation, then a library that has 10,000 e-book check-outs per year can do the math to see what it needs to spend–$3,800.

Publishers like HarperCollins, who introduced this topic, may not like this approach, though, because it is more profitable to sell all titles at the same price, thereby charging the same for a dog as a hit, and then sell additional copies of the hit. They make money in both transactions. In the present case, they have decided that you must purchase twenty-six copies of the book at $0.38 per copy, whether you need that many copies or not. The real push back here for libraries is to accept the HarperCollins premise, and then push for metered rather than fixed pricing. Wonder how HarperCollins would respond to that?

But that is where the current kerfluffle is headed. And if libraries want to get on offense here, they need to take HarperCollins’s plan and insist on a single administrative change: let us purchase e-books on a per circulation basis, they need to say, rather than pretend that the e-book is a “package” of twenty-six circulations.My guess is that the price per circulation that keeps publishers and libraries both in business is higher than thirty-eight cents, but this would be a more transparent pricing system than the one proposed by HarperCollins.

So, the drift in Kindle design has been toward reducing features that make it easy to obtain books from other sources (remember the SD card slot from the Kindle 1?) and making it even easier to buy books from Amazon. (Don’t bother citing the studies that I am sure were conducted to say that this was done because this is what Amazon customers told the company they want.) The problem is that most schools want to do the book buying, and they usually discourage student activities which result in unapproved purchases that appear on the district’s monthly statement. In fact, the workaround in Pinellas County to allow students with Kindles (yes, all 2,000) of them to choose and purchase books for the dedicated ereader the school mandated they carry around with them every day is that the students and their families can “donate” books to the district by purchasing them for the Kindle, but cannot own them outright. Do you see where this is going?

Enter the new firmware upgrade for the Barnes and Noble Nook (released a few months ago–I imagine it has hit most Nooks in captivity by this time). One feature of the upgrade is to add a password option for the book purchasing problem. Now, you can password the device itself, as you can also do with the Kindle (generation 2 and 3), but on the Nook (and, apparently, NOT on the NOOKcolor), under Settings you will find the option to require a password for book purchases from the B&N Store.

How to do? Turn on the Nook and select Settings from the colorful menu across the bottom (hit the little “n” above the screen to awaken if dark). In the resulting menu, choose Device and then “Enable purchase password protection.”  You will then be asked to enter the password on the account to which the Nook is registered. Voila! No books can be purchased from the device without entering the password.

Now I would have preferred the ability to set any password to prevent unauthorized buying, but I guess it makes sense to require the account password to be used. That makes it uniform for all Nooks on that account, and it doesn’t create another password for you to try to manage. But it does argue for unguessable passwords. No more “cougars” and “titans” for the Nooksters among us!

So, this is just one little control, and I can’t reasonably make the argument that B&N listened to educators in any special way when they added it. But score another one for the last, best bookstore around! In the Amazon star chamber, no controls are going to be approved that would hobble (or insert a moment’s pause into) buying something. And maybe Barnes and Noble is making the kind of business mistake that folks like Amazon and Apple avoid at all costs. But, for once, a commonsense improvement that does nothing more than give users more control of their ereader device has been made available, and educators have yet another reason to look somewhere other than the Kindle when they expand their students’ access to books with digital text and mobile reading platforms.

1. Exceed expectations. I expected, and who didn’t, that NOOKcolor would run into some kind of supply or shipping delay, that the promised ship date would come and go without explanation, and that sometime in December (or January) the unit would limp into the house to a great, deflating sense of disappointment. Not so. This announcement, pre-selling, and fulfillment went like clockwork, from my perspective. Just like Amazon.

2. Give us something we don’t already have. The Nook, you know, fit into a rather large field of e-ink, six-inch ereaders when it trailed the Kindle into the marketplace. Its greatest differentiator at the time was that you could actually go hold one and buy it in a store. And many of its features just didn’t (and still don’t) stack up against its prime competitor. But color? Touchscreen? Video? Well, those are things we don’t already have in a device with the form factor of a dedicated ereader and a built-in connection with a real-life bookstore.

3. Make it, you know, easy. The first thing that happens when you turn on your NOOKcolor is you watch a full-screen video welcome by a very enthusiastic young lady. She tells you just what to do to get started, and then passes you on to other step-by-step screens to set up the device and register it to your account at B&N. I was done in a few quick minutes, and believe me, the first impression made by that video got me excited about the device all over again. I was inspired to tweet my happiness immediately.

Having said all that, and in the spirit of optimism about this new entrant into the ereader marketplace, I am not going to start nit-picking about the device. iPad owners are going to say, “so this is what an Android tablet looks like,” Android phone owners are going to say “I could really use this thing if I could find the link to the Android Marketplace,” and Kindle owners are going to say “I don’t need color and backlighting to read.”

But November 18, the day my NOOKcolor arrived, is now on my calendar as Barnes and Noble‘s day in the sun. And I can’t find too many reasons to rain on that parade.

The action in this area, though, has been largely restricted to post-secondary texts, and the needs of underfunded college students. Some of the revolution happened, I think, because someone saw a business model that would work to meet their needs, and some of it happened because the kids had taken to scanning their texts and sharing them online via data torrents. (Funny how many times the Internet has spawned a business area by making illegal activity such as pirating intellectual property so darned easy. See Napster.)

But recent developments mean that the wait is over for K-12 educators who want to join the open source party. Enter CK12.org, an organization founded by former Sun Microsystems folks. (Funny how many times the Internet has spawned not-for-profit helping organizations with money made from the massive profits in enterprise hardware and software sales. See Bill Gates.)

CK12 has been on a mission to “reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide.” The website tells us that they plan to do this by “pioneer[ing] the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning.”

In practice, this means that they are creating textbooks in key subject areas for secondary school educators and releasing them under a non-restrictive Creative Commons license that allows everyone and anyone to download them for free and use them digitally, or pay a small fee to get them printed.

What is even more exciting for K-12 educators is that CK12 recently began offering its top completed textbooks in the popular ePub format for use on mobile reading platforms like the Nook, the Sony, and, through an arrangement with Amazon, the Kindle. (Note, as of this writing, these “open” textbooks come encapsulated in Amazon’s brand of DRM, so they cannot be freely distributed in the way that CK12 intends them to be. In practice, this means that each textbook download can be used only on the device that the DRM designates. Folks at CK12 have acknowledged to me in an email that they recognize that this approach violates the license that they have selected for release of the material, and that they plan to rectify the situation. It should be noted that Amazon has the capability to release these books through its store without DRM, and the cause of its reluctance to do so will be left to the reader’s imagination to discern.)

What is so encouraging about this development is that it has occurred at all. So much of the “open educational resources” movement and the drive to aggregate and mash up these resources is being driven by a “print on demand” philosophy that to find a textbook creator sensitive to the future of mobile reading, its cost efficiencies, and its convenience, is a real pleasure.

So, what is so great about these textbooks from CK12? My six highlights:

1. They are free. No, really, free. (And when Amazon lifts its problematic DRM on these books, they will also be non-commercial.)

2. They have been created with with contemporary pedagogy in mind, by contemporary educators.

3. They are, in the parlance, “mashable.” Teachers may select those sections of the book that they want to use, access it, mix it up with other resources if they wish, and generate their own custom teaching tool. Really beats the inefficiency of the print textbook world where all the sections have to be included in every textbook, whether the teacher needs them or not. See a demo here.

4. They have already been mapped to standards.

5. The simple examples and diagrams reproduce well on the e-ink screen. (This, of course, is a relative statement. E-ink is not really designed for the kind of glorious full-color imagery of either 1) the print textbook itself, 2) the print textbook transferred to a web page, or 3) the textbook formatted for a full-color tablet like the iPad.) Try the Chemistry text as an example: click for ePub download from CK12, or for Kindle download from Amazon. (Image to right is page on cathode ray tube displayed on Kindle Gen 3.)

6. And finally, the sine qua non of truly open education projects, CK12, like Wikipedia, Connexions, and others, encourages you to add, subtract, and edit anything that will make the materials better for your purposes. They say it best themselves: “CK-12 allows one to customize and produce content by re-purposing to suit what needs to be taught, using different modules that may suit a learner’s learning style, region, language, or level of skill, while adhering to the local education standards.” Amen! The new age of the customized curriculum is actually dawning, and CK12 and others are leading the way in allowing educators to make what they need rather than work with what they are given.

Of course, anything this new and revolutionary poses some challenges, and CK12 names two of them:

• “Changing the mindsets of educators who claim not having the time to contribute, CK-12 needs active community involvement”
• “Keeping content contextualized to local, regional requirements as well as curriculum standards globally”

“Changing the mindsets”–a worthy goal. The tagline at the CK12 site says “Download. Customize. Print. Share.” I would only change one thing for the readers of this blog, which explores ereaders in education. I think the tagline should read:

Download. Customize. Print. Share.

In fact, the little six foot display table set up at Borders to display its ereader lineup, a country cousin to the gleaming Nook Huts with their Kate Spade accessories sections that are popping up at the stores of arch-competitor Barnes and Noble, offers more food for thought to the ereader aficionado than just about anything I can think of.

At one end of the table is the Cruz, and at the other is the Aluratek Libre eBook Reader Pro. That little distance encompasses about a decade or more of ereader device history. The Libre is almost a curiousity in 2010, a device with a monochrome LCD screen like the early PDAs (think Palm Pilot), a cable connection for managing content, and a plastic housing with a lot on buttons that are not particularly intuitive in their operation. Readers of this  blog know that I am a fan of smaller ereaders and would still be writing about the Sony Pocket Edition if Sony didn’t keep changing their lineup. So there is allure to the Aluratek, but it is the allure of the past. I have to credit them with making that LCD screen even look like an e-ink screen; I found that kind of amazing (and savvy–buyer beware, that is not an e-ink screen). What else makes the Aluratek a thing of the past? The price. It feels like the folks at Aluratek said to themselves, gosh, nobody in the marketplace has a sub-$100 reader, so why shouldn’t we keep our margins as high as possible? But anyone who recognizes the name Len Edgerly knows that the most expensive component in e-ink readers like the Kindle or Nook is the e-ink screen. And this device doesn’t have one! Aluratek could potentially make a nice little business for itself selling these very limited devices for $79. I can make the case that schools can get everything they need from an ereader by selecting the Libre, specifically because its retro technology would increase the benefit to cost ratio for schools. But that can only happen if Aluratek prices its retro reader aggressively for the limited features it offers. There’s a competitor sitting six feet away on the table at Borders which, for a mere $80 more, offers up-to-date technology, color, wireless, bigger screen, touch screen, um, and much better value. Technology of the past can still work, but not at prices of the present.

Sitting in the middle of the Borders lineup is the Kobo Reader. Now the Kobo is a nice little reader, though it doesn’t do the same things that a first generation Kindle could do in 2008, and it is priced higher than the third generation Kindle that you can order from Amazon today, or pick up at the local Target store. [Update: Kobo announced this week a device with wifi that is priced the same as Kindle 3.] What the Kobo has going for it is its simplicity (the Aluratek device looks like a television remote in comparison) and an apparently terrific corporate parent committed to open platforms and systems. I mean, these guys have an eReader Bill of Rights, including stuff like “the right to freedom of movement.” (With Amazon, you have the right to buy from Amazon.) It is great to see someone mapping out a niche that might be able to co-exist with the corporate might of Amazon, and even challenge it in some instances. Getting its device on par with the Kindle in value is a great first step. This device represents the “present” of ereaders on display at Borders.

So what about the future? How about devices that are not much more bulky than the ultra-lightweight Kindle or Kobo (sorry, the iPad is not in this class for weight), that are running the open Android software, that offer enhanced web browsing (sorry, Webkit or no, the Kindle is never going to be an workable alternative for web access), and that are incredibly competitive on price. Enter the Cruz Reader. $199? Are you kidding me? I bought two Kindle 1s in the last 24 months at a total investment of over $700. Oh, and an iPad for almost that much (and I only got one of them for the money). Can I find $199 for a seven-inch touch tablet running a great OS, an app store, and a really nice reading interface? This, boys and girls, is the future of ereading, on display at Borders today.

That’s the real conundrum in the mix–Borders. Borders has for sale more credible ereader options than anyone else: a retro tech reader that could define the “real” low end of the market, a state-of-the-art ereader with a genuine corporate presence and a bookstore partner, and a glimpse-of-the-future small tablet with features that we all expect to have on the smartphone in our pockets, including capable ereader software. Can Borders really become the retailer that offers folks like me genuine options in ereading? Based on what they have sitting on their six-foot conference table, Borders offers the best and maybe the only place where options can be found today. I like that.

Finally, let me make a prediction. Currently, I own 2 Kindle 1s, 1 Kindle 2, 1 Kindle DX, 1 Kindle 3, 1 Nook, one Sony Pocket Edition, assorted other brand ereaders from 2009 whose names escape me at the moment (Cybook? Astak?), 1 iPhone, 1 Droid phone, 1 iPad–and I read on every single one of them. What do I predict is going to be my next purchase of an ereader?

That’s right, an Android tablet device like the Cruz Reader or the upcoming Tablet from Velocity Micro.

From those same early days, though, it occurred to me and to many others that academic customs and conventions regarding citation of works and of a passage in text would be turned on their heads by Kindle’s adherence to a new form of locating passages within a text by calling them, well, locations.  Much of the discussion among teachers and students about the use of  these newfangled mileage markers in text in schools has focused on the question “How do I check a citation if I don’t have a Kindle?”

Why do people struggle so? I think the hang-up has to do a little bit with the word book itself. Books have pages. And these pages are numbered. Right? If we go down this path in thinking that you are reading a “book” on your Kindle, then we would have to call it a book without page numbers. But that picture changes quite a bit if we posit that what you are reading on your Kindle is not a book, but a file.

Once we make this little shift in vocabulary, the problem gets a lot easier to deal with. The MLA has rules for citing electronic texts that are not paginated books. The following (from the Seventh Edition of the MLA Handbook) seems promising:

Rule 5.7.18.  A Digital File (MLA membership required for online access)

For example, when citing a file, which a Kindle book most assuredly is, the citation might look like this:

Stephen, Levitt D. Freakonomics. Rev. and Expanded ed. New York: Harper Collins, 2006. Kindle file.

The APA even took up this issue in a blog post from last year, saying in part:

For the reference list entry, you’ll need to include the type of e-book version you read (two examples are the Kindle DX version and the Adobe Digital Editions version). In lieu of publisher information, include the book’s DOI or where you downloaded the e-book from (if there is no DOI):

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success [Kindle DX version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com.

The Chicago Manual of Style keeps it pretty simple as well:

Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Harvard Business School Press, 2001), Kindle e-book.

Of course, there is no reason not to help the person who would like to find the source of your citation by including location numbers, or, as the APA suggests, using those structural features of the text itself that do not change by format, such as sections or chapters:

To cite in text, either (a) paraphrase, thus avoiding the problem (e.g., “Gladwell, 2008″), or (b) utilize APA’s guidelines for direct quotations of online material without pagination (see Section 6.05 of the manual). Name the major sections (chapter, section, and paragraph number; abbreviate if titles are long), like you would do if you were citing the Bible or Shakespeare.

Gladwell’s book has numbered chapters, and he’s numbered the sections in the chapters. An example direct quotation might be this:

One of the author’s main points is that “people don’t rise from nothing”  (Gladwell, 2008, Chapter 1, Section 2, para. 5).

It is interesting what happens to the problem of proper citation in a Kindle book when you call it by its proper name: a file.