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

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

In the email, Amazon Kindle Education wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did get into this pickle? Well, I am one of those who downloads every book that is offered through the Kindle Store for free; I mean, how could that hurt? I am also a big fan of Kindle’s “sample” feature–I just love getting those pages to read before I have to buy (even if some of them barely get me past the dedication). And I am also one who lets the periodicals stack up. I have a virtual pile of Wall Street Journals that’s taller than I am. Gotta do something with all of them.

My first step for content cleanup with my Kindle (an original Kindle, not a 2, although all of these suggestions should work with both) is to connect the Kindle to the computer with the USB cord and backup my complete “documents” folder by copying it to my desktop. Then I rename it something like “kindle backup 060609″ and tuck it away somewhere on the hard drive or my thumb drive. Then I ruthlessly delete a bunch of the old newspapers and other detritus from the folder that is resident on the Kindle itself. Why start this way? Because these are the items that account for pages and pages of items when I fire up the “content manager” in the menu to delete items individually.

Why not make all my changes this way? I could. But when you look at the documents in the folder, each with its own .mbp file, the picture is not as clean as it is in the content manager or in the main menu of titles itself. So I disconnect the USB and use the content manager on the Kindle or the menu list of titles in the Kindle 2 and I identify the titles I don’t need handy and delete them from the device.

I am comfortable in doing so, of course, because I backed up the whole folder before I started. No deletion will, in fact, be permanent because of this step. This is important to remember since files that you put on the Kindle yourself, or had sent to your Kindle via wifi after emailing the document to Amazon, won’t be available later from your media library at Amazon. These items are NOT archived by Amazon and it may be that they only exist, in their .azw format, on your Kindle. (Of course, the original Word doc or pdf may well still exist on your computer.)

Finally, just to be safe, I turn on the wifi and synch the Kindle, so that everything can remind itself where it is: on the Kindle, at Amazon, or safely resting in my “documents” folder backup waiting for me to miss it and drag it back onto the Kindle where I can read it again.

Your Conduct. You agree you will use the wireless connectivity provided by Amazon only in connection with Services Amazon provides for the Device. You may not use the wireless connectivity for any other purpose.

Not sure I follow. Amazon created a “Basic Web Browser” that can access the Internet from the Kindle. Clumsy, yes. Slow, most definitely. Wide open, seems to be… So, what could I do on the Internet with a browser and a keypad that violates these terms?

I am going to follow Jeff Bezos and his definition of the Kindle as a “frictionless experience,” one that facilitates rather than restricts more and more reading. Maybe I will download some Uncle Remus to the Kindle so I can more closely study the meaning of all this talk about a briar patch.

Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told LJ that a loan of a Kindle without content is OK, but sharing a device loaded with content “with a wide group of people would not be in line with the terms of use.”

Maybe with the use of works in the public domain from Mark Twain, Shakespeare, and James Fennimore Cooper, schools will remain immune to this “retail only” approach that Amazon is apparently taking. Is it possible to to unleash a revolution, with strings attached?