EduKindle

There are some very important abbreviations in the print publishing industry that I have learned in the past few years. These are OS, OSI, and OP. The terms are related, with OS often leading to OSI, and OSI often a harbinger of OP. In booksellers parlance, these abbreviations stand for “out of stock,” “out of stock indefinitely,” and “out of print.” They chronicle the slow death to which print books are subject as time dampens interest in them.

Sometimes, just sometimes, there is another state for a book to be in. We have all encountered this state while standing at the help desk at Barnes and Noble or Borders when we are told by the associate, “That book isn’t in the store, but we can order it for you, have it here next week.” The book is simply “unavailable,” at least in any terms that are meaningful to me when I want to read it. OS, OSI, OP, and “unavailable” are extremely reader-unfriendly statuses. They each tell a reader that he/she won’t be reading the desired material, at least any time soon. (Maybe the publisher will reprint–check back in six months. Or, the publisher is considering a reprint–check back in a year. Or, there are no plans to reprint–try Google Books or the public library.)

OK, well, that’s what happened to me recently. The conversation turned to Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. My wife had heard Ravitch interviewed on the radio, and the commentator mentioned that the new book was so popular that it was widely unavailable, even after a couple of printintgs. No way! I thought. A relatively niche book on the history of education, unavailable? Impossible. But a quick check of Amazon told the story. Ravitch’s book, the Amazon page told me, “Usually ships within 10 to 12 days.” (Please note: The publication date for the book is March 2, 2010.)

I thought for a moment about where the demand for this niche title was coming from, and then I did the only thing that I could do in order to cut through the systemic inefficiencies that had rendered this title momentarily “unavailable.” I scolled down the page and ordered the Kindle edition of the book. I was reading the first chapter a few minutes later.

(Epilog: The notice about the book being available in 10-12 days stayed on the Amazon page for just about two weeks and, oddly, never changed. As of this writing, a truck full of books must have hit the Amazon warehouse, so the book now ships, once more, within 24 hours.)

What’s the moral of this little tale? That innovations which close massive inefficiencies in production and delivery systems transform the industries in which they occur. So, all the controversy over the price of ebooks? Tempest in a teapot. The battle of competing mobile reading platforms? Preliminary rounds. The fate of publishers who fight to lock in profit by propping up inefficient systems? The scrapheap of history.

This takes me back to the first few orders I ever placed with Amazon. Once I decided that I would take the risk with my credit card on the web and the delivery service, it occurred to me that I could order books that I wanted but had never found in book stores. It is hard to imagine, but in those days, ten or fifteen years ago, I had a list of books in my head that I always checked for in book stores I visited. It was a lucky day when I found one. In fact, I tended to hoard the books I found because I really didn’t know when I would have a chance to get them again. Never thought of ordering a book. Wasn’t really sure how to do it, back in the old days. So my first few orders from Amazon contained books that I had been carrying around on my mental checklist; what a mindbender it was to finally be relieved of that list and of the whole issue of how I could get the books that I wanted.

Furthermore, I tended to know only about those books that I had physically seen somewhere or read about in a magazine or newspaper; there really wasn’t a very efficient way to spread the word about books before the advent of the internet.  After that first order from Amazon, the company started making book suggestions based on the books I had already ordered. What I preferred had cognates in other peoples’ experience, and the Amazon database just had to match like with like. I now had a hyper-efficient way of finding out about other books that might interest me, on top of the hyper-efficient book distribution system created by Amazon in the first place.

My experience with the Ravitch book is just another milestone a bit further down the same road. Publishers just don’t run out of digital copies of a book. A digital copy is never in the wrong bookstore or the wrong city. A digital copy is never OS, OSI, or OP. And with the Google book project, books that have been OP for years will never be OP again. Pretty soon, “out-of-print” won’t mean much, except in the history books. Does it really seem like something worth preserving?

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.)

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.

Kindlepedia has been a remarkable success since we launched it at the beginning of June.  Since then, hundreds of readers have requested articles in pristine Mobipocket format, perfect for reading on the Kindle, and, by the beginning of August, we topped 1,000 articles served. The list of created articles reads like a roadmap of the human mind–just see the Wordle I made from the topics folks selected above, courtesy of www.wordle.net.

Pierre Gorissen has produced a nifty video on how to use the Kindlepedia tool from EduKindle to create reference articles for you Kindle or any other ereader that supports the Mobipocket format.

In addition, Pierre has written a little script that allows you to make a bookmarklet in your browser (works fine in my Firefox) that will automatically send any page you are on at Wikipedia to the Kindlepedia engine and return the article for download, perfectly formatted with a linked table of contents and live links throughout. He demonstrates how to set this up in the video.

I am posting the video here, and you can see more of Pierre’s handiwork at the EduKindle Community site.

Right after I posted Calendar for Kindle as a free download a few weeks ago, I got a bunch of feedback about how folks would really like it to work. Calendar was intended as a quick reference, but many of you are like me and find it helpful to be able to keep notes and reminders on the Kindle using the keypad (one of the BIG advantages that the Kindle has over other ereaders). In fact, I have found myself using Notepad more and more, sitting at Starbucks or at my daughter’s indoor lacrosse practice, not fumbling for a pen and the back of a store receipt to take a note on. I really like being able to view all my notes at once by selecting “My Notes and Marks” while I have Notepad open.

So, long story short, based on your feedback, I created Planner 2009 for Kindle and you can get it on the Downloads page (see tab above). Here you can keep your date reminders in an orderly way, but still navigate around the year pretty quickly with the linked months on the start page and the “back button.” (I was glad to hear Leslie Nicoll mention this underused navigation resource her Kindle Chronicles interview a week or so ago!) I also included a “Year at a Glance” page and some instructions for use.

Go ahead and grab the Planner for free and let me know what you think!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

Not sure why I couldn’t figure this out but I finally got my answer on how to place hyphens and underscores into URLs that I was typing into the Kindle’s basic web browser. Hit the SYM key (right next to the HOME key in the bottom row and a list of symbols pops up along the right side of the screen. Select anything from a dollar sign to a curly bracket and you are good to go!

Blessedly, the designers anticipated the need for the @ and / characters–these occupy their own keys on the physical keyboard.

Also, when the input box pops up for you to input a note or other text, there are several options for special characters shown across the top of the box. Each requires that you press the ALT key and another key to create the special character. ALT+6, for example, creates a question mark, ALT+8 a colon, and so forth.

When I first got my Kindle I was gaga about the free wireless connection.  I figured that it would allow me to look stuff up, check email, post to this blog, and do all kinds of cool stuff.

Something that I learned was how many dedicated “mobile” services now exist to do this kind of thing.  One of them is the Wapedia, a mobile version of Wikipedia.  With the limited browsing capability of the Kindle, this kind of simply formatted site makes it easy to look up information you need on the spur of the moment.

At the mobile site for EduKindle, I put a link to Wapedia in the productivity section.  Got a question that needs answering?   Check it out!