EduKindle

Amazon released in beta this week its Kindle for PC application, and educators will welcome this development. Even though you have heard me rant a bit about the anti-education direction the company has taken in the development of the Kindle ereader (loss of SD card slot, loss of replaceable battery, loss of external Whispernet on-off button, and so forth), I have been generally more positive about the development of the online and now software tools that the company has created to support the use of the device: Kindle for iPhone app–great, addition of ability to view notes and marks online–fabulous, and now, Kindle for PC–not bad at all.

Ereader software for computers is one area in which Amazon has NOT led the way; many, many companies have created ereader software for devices from the Palm Pilot to the netbook. These providers have contributed to the current plethora of formats for ebooks, and each has tried, in its own way, to lock readers in to a particular format, all the better to lock in business with them. This is a game that Amazon knows well and has played aggressively with its closed system and its proprietary format.

Adding a desktop app that integrates with your Kindle library and, of course, the Kindle Store, can be construed as just another tactic in the battle for business. But for educators, “this time we win!” (to quote Brad Pitt’s line from The Mexican). Why? Well, let’s start with the fact that, while there aren’t a whole lot of Kindles in schools these days, there sure are a heck of a lot of computers! Now, any student who goes to the library to study or who fires up the computer at home can view content in the format exclusive to the Kindle. With the popularity of the Kindle and the “cool factor” that it brings, this may be the way that schools and educators begin to think about making academic reading content available across their networks. Kids “get” the idea of a Kindle, and now that idea is readily available at every school in the country.

Could kids have been reading ebooks at school before Kindle for PC (KFPC)? Sure they could have, but in fact they weren’t. Now there is a model in place for a “anywhere, anytime reading” that includes the PC on the desk over there and the ereader device in my bag (and the iPhone in my pocket). Could this arrangement have been cobbled together before KFPC? Sure it could, but it wasn’t very convenient. Now it is. A win for the consumer mentality applied to the schoolhouse.

David Rothman at TeleRead has a nice review of KFPC from an ebook reader’s perspective that I don’t need to repeat here. The software is very basic, with a plain interface, and very few tweakable options that allow you to customize the interface. No two-page reading pane, that sort of thing. Can’t make notes while reading (a limitation for educational uses that amazon is working on correcting). But teachers like simple, teachers like things that don’t crash. So, for me, I think this app is a solid step forward for doing business with Amazon in an academic context.

And what is even better, maybe, for folks like Kathy Parker and her Kindle Crew out there in Seneca IL, is that a PC station qualifies as one of the six devices onto which most Kindle books can be downloaded and viewed. The minute I loaded the app and connected with the mother ship, a new mobile device popped up in my list of such devices on the “Manage Your Kindle” page: “William’s Kindle for PC”, right there next to “Will’s iPhone.”

Educators should not be confused by others’ confusion over whether KFPC will display books not obtained form the Amazon Kindle Store. It absolutely will. In fact, once you open a “free” book that you got from Project Gutenberg in the Mobipocket format that the Kindle prefers, it will appear in your onboard KFPC library unless you remove it. In fact, all the books on your computer that are formatted a Mobipocket files will take on the KFPC icon image shown here. If you look quickly, you can watch the transformation take place. This makes it easy to check a file, a position number, a Table of Contents–whatever–on your PC before you view it on your Kindle. Handy.

For example, I created an article from Wikipedia using the Kindlepedia tool about the Berlin Wall. You can download it here. Once it is on your desktop, the icon will look like the book above, and it will go into your onboard library (NOT the library at the mother ship) and open up for reading. Note that this version of the article appears in full color and nice, sharp resolution on the screen. And if you don’t finish reading it in KFPC, just pop the file onto your Kindle and read up on this topic later. Really handy.

So its a big thumbs up for Kindle for PC from an educator’s standpoint. I will look forward to comment from other Kindle-curious educators about KFPC and the ways it makes ebook reading a reality in schools.

Kindle for Mac, anyone? (Amazon says it is on the way.)

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.

Why not? It is an accepted practice that hardware and software vendors offer reduced pricing for educators. I mean, even Microsoft does it, and these guys are not known for leaving money on the table. So why not Amazon and why not the Kindle?

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.)

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!!!]

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?