Let me explain. Amazon makes it possible for you to read a book that you have purchased on whichever reading device that you happen to have with you at any time, as long as two requirements are fulfilled:

Requirement 1: Amazon software must be installed on each of your reading devices.
Requirement 2: An internet connection must be present.

When these two requirements are met, Amazon allows you to access your whole library of books that you have purchased through the Kindle store on up to six devices registered to your account, no matter where you are or what device you happen to have with you at the time.

Very cool.

For me, it means being able to fire up Drive or How We Decide or Iconoclast while waiting for a haircut or for a movie. My Michael Connelly novel is with me during rain delays and long lines at the supermarket. Synchronization means that I have achieved a state of multiple-platform nirvana wherein all my books are with me all the time.

Even better, I don’t have to remember what page I was on last time I picked up the book. The mother ship at Amazon always offers to “synch to furthest page read” when I open a book on a different device than the one I was reading on last time. This way, I never lose my place and the reading experience becomes, as Jeff Bezos would say, “frictionless.”

This is a wonderful feature, except when my wife is reading the same book on her Kindle. Then, the “furthest page read” may not be MY furthest page read; rather, it may be HER furthest page read. The synchronization feature also means that her highlights appear in “my” copy of the book and mine in hers. When there is more than one reader of a book on the account, the ability to share books among multiple Kindles/devices registered to the same account creates a conflict with the ability to synchronize one’s reading among those various devices.

(In recent months, Amazon has made this feature even better, in one sense, by offering to let you see the passages that other readers around the world have underlined. You can disable this feature by selecting “turn off” Popular Highlights on the second page of Settings in the Menu from your Home screen.)

So, synchronization is a great feature for the individual consumer/reader, but raises a special problem for teachers who want to load six copies of a book onto six different Kindles in their account for six different students to read. What to do?

How To De-Synchronize Your Kindles:

The answer is simple. You can “de-synchronize” the Kindles and other devices registered to a single account.

Just go to the page at Amazon called “Manage My Kindle” and scroll to the bottom, where you will see a link named “Manage synchronization between devices.” This is where you will find the following guidance from the Amazon team (see screen shot below, #1):

“You should turn synchronization off only if:
* You and someone else are reading the same book, AND
* The Kindles are registered to a single account”

The recommendation seems sound. So many advantages of the Amazon Kindle system flow from the synchronization feature that it only makes sense to keep it on (which is the default setting) unless it is creating a problem for you.

If you decide to “de-synchronize” because you want each device in the classroom (or at the house) to operate independently of the others, then look for the button on the right that allows you to “Turn Synchronization Off” (see illustration, #2).

Click for larger image

Remember, teachers, that turning off synchronization does not in any way interfere with your ability to load books onto Kindle, or with the students’ ability to highlight passages or make notes. Those highlights and notes will simply be stored “locally,” saved only on the specific Kindle on which they were made. They can still be accessed by your or the students by tethering the Kindle to a computer with the USB cord and accessing the text file where those notes and highlights are stored.

Making Synchronization Work for Teachers:

Now, sometimes it might be cool to have multiple students commenting and highlighting a book across multiple devices. That might even become a best practice for Kindle/ereader use in the classroom. A literature circle or book club of kids take on a read together, share their notes and highlights, and then each create a summary piece of writing explaining a passage or two that received particular attention from the group. Or make the marked up text a group project, finding six passages that seem significant and each making a comment that the teacher could read and respond to or even grade.

Hint: one special power of the synchronization feature is that the highlights and comments that are made in the text by an individual or a group are available for viewing online here after login. Sign in and look at the column to the right; there you will find a icons for “Highlights” and “Notes.” Students could be required to put their name at the end of each note they create, and the teacher could browse these notes easily without have the Kindles handy or any file transfer reqquired.

So, in the end, whether you keep your devices synchronized or not just “depends” on the kind of reading experience multiple readers on a single Amazon Kindle account want to have.

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.

The Kindle is a superb reading platform. But print books also double as serviceable writing platform (score one for the era spawned by Mr. Gutenberg and his press!). And that difference lies at the heart of one difficulty that the Kindle encounters when it enters the classroom. Students want to mark up their books, put sticky notes on important passages, scribble reminders to themselves in the margins. In fact, as a graduate student I actually transferred the marginalia from one copy of Paradise Lost to another for one of my professors. (That exercise provided a terrific window into an expert’s close reading of the text, by the way.) It is hard to circle things, draw arrows, and annotate all over the place on any ereader, Kindle included. So the lack of a robust writing dimension to the Kindle has hobbled it from the get-go for eager, thoughtful students who want to keep what they write right alongside what they’ve read.

Enter Notepad for Kindle. I tried to think of a way that a reader could capture a thought, a reference, or connection and have an easy way to get to it later. The Notepad became a way to do that without exiting the Kindle environment and without burying the idea deep in a book where it might be difficult to find. Now this is no substitute for scribbles, circles, and arrows, but it does bring a measure of organization to the writing process when you have a Kindle in your hand.

Devices with touch technology, like my iPhone or Android phone, have notepad utilities built in or easily downloadable as apps. When I want to harvest a thought, I simply launch the notepad and type it in. Notepad for Kindle is meant to give a similar capacity to those of us who love to read on our Kindles.

BTW, the Notepad is free from the downloads page of this site. Or you can grab a copy yourself by clicking right here.

These calculators became a fixture in our schools, at least for the higher level math and science courses, because they made the process of performing certain calculations much quicker and easier, so that less class time had to be spent on graphing complicated equations manually and more could be spent on teaching and learning about the math behind the graphs. In short, graphing calculators became indispensable because they empowered each student to operate on a more equal footing and they allowed the teacher to spend more time teaching. Nowadays, they are just an expected part of the educational landscape, a $139 appliance that pretty much every serious math student owns and even rushes out to replace if lost or damaged. You just gotta have one.

Since the beginning (and that would be 2007), I have felt that the Kindle or some ereader would achieve a combination of features and price that would make them the graphing calculator of the 21st century. I just didn’t think it would happen so soon.

With its announcement of a next-generation Kindle that connects via wifi and offers improved screen resolution and a bunch of features I still need to read up on, that moment is upon us. You can get a Kindle for the same price as a graphing calculator. Is $139 the ultimate magic number? I don’t know. But I do know that it is a number that has worked for a generation of math students; why won’t it work for this generation of readers? In fact, there is more reason to adopt an ereader like the Kindle because it serves a wider swath of the student population. The graphing calculator supports the curriculum at one, fairly specialized level in K-12 education; the Kindle supports multiple subjects from the least to the most advanced levels. I just don’t think folks have connected the dots on this one yet. And $139 is within shouting distance of the $99 price point that market pundits and the general public agree will ignite mass adoption of the devices.

Bezos and company seem intent on making the Kindle the device at the center of that mass adoption and, with the head-spinning rapidity with which they are lowering the price and adding options, I think that they might just be on to something.

Where do you get the serial number? Well, it is printed in extremely small print on the back of each device (have your magnifying glass handy if you look there), so Kathy takes the serial number off the box each Kindle came in. This is why it’s important to keep the Kindles numbered from the beginning, and also to jot the number on the box itself when you put the sticky on the Kindle. (Kathy keeps the box associated with each Kindle around in case the Kindle has to go back–apparently Amazon likes it that way.)  Ugh.

OK, anyway, now it is time to put that serial number from the box into the Manage My Kindle page at the mother ship, which will enable Kathy to track her content downloads to specific devices, even if it is a broken Kindle that a student has brought back to her. Registered properly, “Kathy’s 53rd Kindle” will mean the same thing to Amazon as it does to Kathy, and as it does to the student who has it in her bookbag. It is time for Kindle to Phone Home.

If this is beginning to sound like an assembly line operation, well, that’s because it is. Sitting at her desk, Kathy calls out for one of the helpers to bring her a stack of charged and stickered Kindles. Not just any stack, but the one with the next Kindle number in her system. Why? Because when Kathy registers the next Kindle, Amazon will assign it the next number in its sequence, meaning that if Amazon knows that Kathy has 52 Kindles, the next one she registers will become “Kathy’s 53rd Kindle” by default. No time for confusion this. The conversation goes as follows:

Kathy: I’m ready for more Kindles!

Helper: What number are you on?

Kathy: 54.

Helper: You have Kindle 54 or you need Kindle 54?

Kathy: I need Kindle 54.

Helper: Ok, who has Kindle 54?

Helper 2: I think its on the table by the door.

Helper: No, this says Kindle 78.

Helper 2: Maybe it’s in the server room.

Helper: I’ll look.

You get the picture. Registering the Kindle that has the number 55 on its back in the 54th position, a misstep with grave consequences if not noticed immediately, is to be avoided at all costs. So an orderly exchange of Kindles is essential at the moment of registration.

On the Manage My Kindle page, Kathy scrolls down to the “Register a new Kindle” link at the bottom of her list of Kindles and clicks it, opening a text box into which she can type the serial number from the box. Sixteen digits in, a push of the button, and that Kindle is officially connected to home base. Kindle Phoned Home. On to the next. Eighty times. Ugh.

But, you know, it was kind of fun. Kathy is so enthusiastic about the benefit to her kids that the time flies with smiles all around. In May, Kathy put out a tweet about how much the Kindles meant to the kids at her school this year:

8th grader 2 mention being first “Kindle 8th Graders” in her commencement speech tonight. Jeff Bezos you impacted ed.

Whether you meant to or not, Jeff Bezos, you impacted ed.

Well, Amazon’s consumer bias also makes setting up multiple devices a chore for folks like Kathy. The system is designed to work with a single device, or a few that a family might have on a single Amazon account. So, setting up 80 Kindles at a time involves repeating a process that a consumer might do once eighty times in a row. And that’s before you even start downloading books to the devices, another serial process that must be repeated 80 times for each book you want to put on all the Kindles.

But all of this didn’t seem to disturb good-natured Kathy, pictured above with the author, near the table where a dozen of the new Kindles were receiving their first charge. Kathy immediately starts the charging process once she gets the Kindle boxes open so that she can tell right away if there is a defective Kindle among the bunch. So far, on this shipment, she has only found one, which Amazon will quickly replace.

As she sets the Kindles up for charging, Kathy also numbers the Kindles with a sticky note. This step accomplishes a few things. First, it creates the first identifier that Kathy will use to record the Kindle in her district inventory. Second, it tells Kathy where each Kindle stands in the queue to be registered in her Kindle account at Amazon. Linking the physical number of the Kindle to the name that the Kindle will ultimately hold in the Amazon system (e.g. “Kathy’s 52nd Kindle,” visible at the top of each device’s Home screen) is key to managing content on the individual Kindles once they are in the hands of students.

But I have gotten a step ahead of myself. You can’t get to this stage until you have opened up each Kindle’s packaging by pulling the little tab across the end of the tight little box the Kindles come in. (Anyone remember the big, white book-like enclosures for the first generation of Kindles?) Kathy’s assistant in the process, husband Steve (himself principal of a nearby school that is using Kindles), showed me what a chore that is, since the tabs don’t really sit up where you can pull on them. For this batch of Kindles, at least, a fingernail couldn’t quite do the job (and I tried it myself!). Steve discovered that some kind of implement is required–a letter opener or pocket knife–to lift the tab so the sealing strip can be pulled off and the Kindle liberated for use. This seems like a small thing but, repeated eighty or a hundred times, it adds a significant step to the batch processing of Kindles for student use.

Once the Kindles are opened, labeled, and charged, they are ready to be registered with Amazon. The details of that procedure will follow in Part 2 of this post.

The findings are clear. Researchers report:

• the students improved between 41% and 70% on their SRA Reading scores after one year of large print remediation, gains that continued during summer breaks, unlike the typical loss from regular print books

• because there are fewer words and those words are easier to decode, struggling readers make substantial progress with comprehension, tracking, and fluency, all while making fewer decoding mistakes. Additionally, research shows that fewer words on the page lower anxiety levels in struggling readers

• at least one aspect of format — font size or style — was an important factor for 70% of the children when making book selections. Statements by the children regarding font revealed that they based their book selections on the legibility of the text

• students were able to read books on a higher reading level when the books were Large Print, as opposed to only being able to read on- or below-grade level books in regular print.

These are pretty compelling findings, especially given that original research was undertaken to specifically test the value of large print books for comprehension, fluency, and vocab development. The paper offers considerable ammunition for schools seeking grants to offer larger fonts to students in all phases of their academic and pleasure reading.

Should I get a bunch of Kindles for my school? It’s a question the answer to which is up in the air. A bunch of iPads? Still in doubt. Here’s the real question: should I be taking advantage of the properties of digital text in my teaching? The answer to that one is unequivocal, and the answer is yes.

OK, you say, digital text has been around for a long time. What’s the big deal right now? The answer to that one is easy, too: the emergence of dedicated mobile reading platforms, like the Kindle and the iPad (and the iPhone, and the Sony Reader, and the Nook). Digital text has been available for a long time in one form, primarily, and that is formatted as HTML and viewed on a computer monitor. (In fact, it is indicative of this history that 50% of ebooks today are read on a computer, even with the proliferation of choices in mobile readers.)

So what’s different now? For the first time we have devices and software that are dedicated to taking advantage of the virtues of digital text. My quick list of those virtues includes:

• variable text size
• variable type face
• distribution of text electronically
• availability of free text
• storage requirements for digital text
• amount of the world’s knowledge already captured in digital text
• user control of digital text
• the sustainability of digital text
• fresh formats for prose enabled by digital text

In this and the next few posts, I am going to discuss  these virtues and link them to what we know about how students learn. First up, variable text size.

Digital Text: The Advantage of Variable Font Size for Reading

Something that has been widely reported is the pleasure that a lot of people take in reading text on the Kindle at a larger font size than is typical for them. That is certainly true for me; I am a declared lover of Kindle Font Size #4 which, as it turns out, is roughly equivalent to a 14 point font. In an unscientific survey I conducted on this blog a while back, 70% of the participants indicated a preference for Kindle Font Size #3 or higher. While this was a very small sample, the preference for larger font sizes was clear.

In the meantime, students have put their thoughts on the record about font size, and bigger is certainly preferred by the middle school students polled by Kathy Parker at Seneca (IL) Middle School, where Kathy has run a Kindle pilot program this past school year. They like the largest font size, period. They say it helps them read better.

Recently, a blogger in the UK noted that reading text on his iPhone was easier than in books or other settings. Why? A bit of investigation told him that larger fonts reduce the amount of print on the page; words are less jammed together. The blogger, it turns out, is dyslexic, and receives this diagnosis of the situation validated by a prominent neuroscientist, who comments that “Many dyslexics have problems with ‘crowding’, where they’re distracted by the words surrounding the word they’re trying to read.”

I did a little research myself on the “crowding” phenomenon, which has been carefully studied by researchers here and abroad, especially as it affects the reading rate of “normal” and “dyslexic” readers. The findings across many studies are clear:

• all readers benefit from increasing text size up to a maximum, after which increased reading rate associated with the larger text flattens out
• the optimal font size for “normal” readers is larger than average, but not as large as it is for dyslexic readers
• much of the reading rate difference between normal and dyslexic readers can be mitigated through increased font size

In a Research Brief I wrote recently on the subject, I provide an overview of “crowding”: “In the research, crowding specifically refers to “the difficulty in identifying a letter embedded in other letters” (Chung, 2007). Studies have shown that the crowding effect impacts reading rates in both the horizontal and vertical proximity of text, so that larger font size creates more space between adjacent letters in the text, and may increase line spacing as well, reducing crowding.”

I have also summarized the findings of a number of studies. For example, a 2009 study conducted at the University of Rome, Italy, tells us that for both the control and experimental groups, “…the reading rate increased with print size up to a maximum. In dyslexics, the fastest rate was obtained at a significantly larger character size than in controls” (Martelli, DiFilippo, Spinelli, and Zoccolotti, 2009).

You can read or download a copy of the study in PDF format right here.

And if the research doesn’t persuade you, maybe the words of the middle schoolers who have reported on their Kindle-enabled reading will:  “The font that everyone prefers to use with the Kindle 2 is the largest font size.”