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.

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.”

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?

But eReadUps goes farther, a lot farther.

At eReadUps, you can build multi-article books using the first few results from Wikipedia for free, always. And once we emerge from the “beta” period in a few weeks, you will be able to sign up for a premium membership and enjoy many other features that the site has to offer, like:

1. Access to every every source on our growing list
2. Ability to build eReadUps from as many articles as you like
3. Free storage for all your eReadUps in your own personal My Stuff page
4. Access to more articles in other languages
5. Choice of article format: .mobi for the Kindle and ePub for most other readers
6. A free book just for signing up, and free content every week on the site

The free book currently offered to members is Wikibooks’ extensive guide to First Aid, a handy reference to have on board for Kindle lovers.

So, if you like to grab information that interests you or that you need, get it formatted especially for the Kindle, store it online, and have the option to add it wirelessly to your Kindle library, give eReadUps a try! To request a beta code, just click on Join Now and send us your email address. We will send out invitations as they become available.

(Special thanks to Len Edgerly and the Kindle Chronicles for featuring eReadUps in the TKC Podcast #83, which also contain Len’s interview with Kindle guru Stephen Windwalker, author of the Kindle Nation blog and several books about the Kindle. Well worth a listen!)

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.)

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.

With larger readers all the craze these days, led by the Kindle DX and by the promised arrival of the Plastic Logic reader in the new year, I was quite surprised to find myself drawn to this smaller “pocket” reader. Maybe that comes from finding the iPhone to be a better ereader than I expected it to be, or maybe it grows out of the fact that I still love my Kindle 1 for its portability. The DX is just a tad too big for my everyday reading, with the exception of my morning perusal of the New York Times.

So I saw this little unit and decided to give it a try. A fuller review from an educator’s perspective to follow!

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama

What I liked reading in the coverage of the event were the comments of school children themselves, most of who were pretty impressed that the President would take the time to speak to them directly…about anything. How did your students react?

“Not having access to the advanced reading features of the Kindle DX—including the ability to download books and course materials, add my own bookmarks and notes, and look up supplemental information instantly on the Internet when I encounter it in my reading—will lock me out of this new technology and put me and other blind students at a competitive disadvantage relative to our sighted peers.“

My reaction was, wait a minute, how can we expect every new innovation leap fully formed from the mind of its inventor and accommodate the needs of every user on its first outing? I can think of a lot of gadgets brought to market in the last decade that were not readily usable by everyone in the population. In fact, the new Kindle sports a helpful feature, onboard text-to-speech functionality, that seems to be right up the alley of those who have trouble reading the print for themselves. Making an ereader device that offers many advantages to blind as well as sighted students appears to be a step forward, rather than “unconscionable discrimination against and callous indifference to the right of blind students to receive an equal education,” as claimed by Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, one of the plaintiffs in the suit.

Then, as I thought about this a bit more, I began to be persuaded by the merits of the suit.

This same Dr. Maurer, in a more reasoned and less inflamatory section of his statement, makes a lot of sense when he says:

“Given the highly-advanced technology involved, there is no good reason that Amazon’s Kindle DX device should be inaccessible to blind students.  Amazon could have used the same text-to-speech technology that reads e-books on the device aloud to make its menus accessible to the blind, but it chose not to do so.“

You know, the guy has a point. Is it possible that Amazon didn’t see this coming? Any school administrator worth his or her salt would have noticed that the very feature of the Kindle that addresses the needs of the blind highlights the limitations of the device.

Welcome to the world of publicly funded education and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, wizards of business!

But this is the kind of thing that Amazon, with its laser focus on the consumer experience, isn’t really thinking about as it proposes the Kindle as an academic device. The company has already redesigned the keypad almost out of existence, and seems not to have considered that its commitment to pdf handling bypasses the value of its text-to-speech technology altogether, meaning that neither the sighted nor the blind will be able to have a textbook in pdf format read to them on the Kindle.

So, I am forced to side with the plaintiffs in this case. Amazon and its partners (the universities themselves) should have seen this coming. As one commenter on this situation observed,  retrofitting the bathrooms in your building to accommodate folks in wheelchairs doesn’t really cut it if you don’t build a ramp to ensure that they can get into the building.