The practice is not all generosity of spirit for Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and a slew of other very wealthy technology magnates; there is a bit of self interest involved in discounting as well. The reasoning goes something like this: giving up margin on your products for a narrow segment of your business like education can be a win-win if your marketing and publicity folks are worth their salt. Not only are you embedding your technology and your brand into a very large group of organizations that, at one time or another, touch every single American alive, but you are also permitted, in doing so, to put phrases like “Microsoft Loves Teachers” and “Building America’s Future, One Mac at a Time.” And because you are still charging good money for these goods and services, while making it look like you are giving them away, the impact on the bottom line is only mildly rather than insanely lucrative as it is in your other markets.

Giving a discount to a good cause also validates the prices you are charging your other customers. Nobody expects to pay what teachers pay, so paying more seems quite reasonable. Voila! Maximum exposure to rising and future generations, good citizen awards all around, and a buttressing of your pricing power. It’s the trifecta!

So, Mr. Bezos, how about a break on the Kindle for educators who want to experiment with your remarkable device? If you think they are, as a group, too small for such consideration, just look at what they did for Apple in the past thirty or so years:

Apple’s sustained growth during the early 1980s was in great part due to its leadership in the education sector, attributed to an implementation of the LOGO Programming Language by Logo Computer Systems Inc., (LCSI), for the Apple II platform. The success of Apple and LOGO in the education environment provided Apple with a broad base of loyal users around the world. The drive into education was accentuated in California by a momentous agreement concluded between Steve Jobs and Jim Baroux of LCSI, agreeing with the donation of one Apple II and one Apple LOGO software package to each public school in the state. The arrangement, (eventually replicated in Texas), established a strong and pervasive presence for Apple in all schools throughout California, that ignited the acquisition of Apple IIs in schools across the country. The conquest of education became critical to Apple’s acceptance in the home, as parents supported children’s continued learning experience after school [emphasis mine]. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.)

And now, with the advent of the iPad in education, Apple proposes to increase its lead by continuing its educator-friendly policies. We just got our iPad 2 through the educator section of the Apple site and, although the discount amounts to free shipping for an individual educator, there is a presence at Apple that supports and solicits educational use of its products. Now, the “Volume Purchasing Program” that Apple offers for the “apps” that drive the use of the iPad ensures that educators can access and use the iPad in the classroom without petitioning the company for a way to do so.

Amazon could tear a page from this playbook if it were truly interested in seeing the Kindle make a mark in schools around the country.

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.

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.

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.

I was drawn to this ereader because of the size. My Kindle DX spends most of its time on and end table in my living room because of its size–the DX is just not that convenient to carry. The DX needs to go inside my bag next to the folders and legal pads (where it fits very nicely), but it’s not the reader I grab in the car waiting at the drive-thru or at the dentist’s office. (Right now, I grab my Kindle 1.) But the Sony Pocket Edition is a great candidate for the quick, easy, have-a-minute read that these devices make possible. In this regard, size matters.

Now, I have read chapters of books on my iPhone using the Kindle app, and that is good in a pinch as well. But the thing that hooked me on ereaders in the first place is the e-ink screen. In this regard, I just don’t get Nicholson Baker and the others who find e-ink screens to be a muddy mess. The Kindle and the Sony both produce a crisp e-ink display that I find pleasurable to read, and the Sony not a bit less than the Kindle.

From a Kindler’s perspective, the greatest limitation of the Sony Pocket Edition is the absence of wireless connectivity to a source, any source, of reading material. This is the Kindle’s gift to the world, and soon to be matched by other devices.

But what I found is that the Sony interface through their “eBook Library” software provides an experience very similar to the one that I have happily participated in with my iPod Mini and iTunes. The Sony software, once installed on your computer, looks like a primitive version of iTunes. There is the list of folders and devices on the left, the list of items in the selected folder or device on the right. Plug in the Pocket Edition and it is recognized, just like my iPod with the iTunes software. The Sony software certainly doesn’t offer all the bells and whistles that iTunes does, but it gets the job done. It allows you to access content and transfer it, create collections, and otherwise manage your reading, both on and off the device.

Now the BIG up for Sony is its integration with Google Books, where a treasure trove of Epub-formatted public domain texts await. And the Library+Sony Bookstore make it VERY easy grab and load those books.  More on that wondrous process in the next installment of my look at the Sony Pocket Edition.