To go ahead and return them early, I just went back to the Manage My Kindle page at Amazon, where, as we have said, all the action takes place for Kindle Library Lending. By clicking the little plus sign (+) next to the title, all the book information appeared in a drop-down, including the due date and an offer to buy the book. But clicking on the “Actions” button to the right offered me the option I was looking for: “Return this book,” right below an offer to buy the book. I clicked it, confirmed my intention to return the book, and returned to the e-book lending section of my local library site. There, I was able to check the book out again immediately (no holds!), and read on for a couple more weeks.

On my Kindle, each title I had returned now showed a [Loan Ended] notice before the title, and, where I had just checked the book out a second time, the title appeared again below, a completely “separate” copy, although one which retains my notes and marks from the earlier “borrow” (nice, huh?–and that would be true if I took the offer to buy the book and loaded back to the Kindle that way). Same treatment for the one book that I allowed to expire, about which I received a different email the next day, telling me that my loan had run its course and offering to let me buy the book.

Smooth as silk! Again, the Amazon system anticipates and addresses users’ needs–a positively “frictionless” experience.  And, just in case those of us who like to freeload and read books that we have not paid for by availing ourselves of the good offices of our local libraries–just in case, I say, that any of us should forget that these books are things that can be bought and paid for, well, every step of borrowing a book through Amazon and Overdrive via the library includes that all-important offer to buy the book.

So, where exactly is the information I seek? The big difference with the Kindle/Overdrive lending system is that all the mechanics of book lending take place at the Amazon site, and that, indeed, is where the return or expiration date information resides. Just go to “Manage My Kindle” (an important page for any Kindle owner), find the book in the list that pops up (“Your Kindle Library”), noting that it is labeled with the words “public library,” and click on the little plus (+) sign next to it for book information, which includes the expiration date.

Never mind that the first time I opened this info it told me the book would be returned in, like, 1969 or something. Further trials have produced the more likely return date of October 9, 2011. So all is well in the Kindle lending world!

Oh, and in case you were wondering about the economic drivers behind this hugely expensive system, you will find a link to purchase the book conveniently located right next to the return date…

The announcement was met with a sense of anti-climax, though, as many of us rushed to our local library’s website to borrow a Kindle book, only to find that the roll-out is incomplete at this time. No mention of a Kindle title at my public library, for instance, until very late in the week.

Now that the system has propogated, though, folks like me are delighted to see the number of available titles. At my library, for instance, there are over 700 Kindle books with copies available. Wow! How far we have come in the world of e-books in such a short time! And with the Kindle books, the system is set up to allow patrons to have the books they borrow sent directly to their Kindles via wifi (but not 3G–see below). Oh, happy day! Unlike borrowing an ePub book and installing it manually on my Nook, these Kindle books will just appear once I check them out. Ahhh.

For Kindle owners, you will find that checking a Kindle book out from your public library will kick you over to the Amazon site, where you can pick the device you want the book sent to. I just downloaded the limit of four books, and the process works seamlessly. Another example of Amazon winning by offering the most user-friendly interface around.

It is funny to me, though, how developments surrounding the Kindle grab attention to a subject. I mean, before the Kindle itself came out, there had been e-books and e-readers for years, and a devoted crew of intrepid e-bookers who could read stuff on just about anything. But, to the general public, e-books were mostly a nonentity, until Kindle, which, er, kindled interest in e-reading like nothing else. Now that Kindle has turned up at the public library, everyone wants to know what it means, how borrowing works, and how it affects their library or Amazon accounts. Here are the three key facts that you need to know to use the new service:

1. Your library still has to buy books to make them available to library patrons. I read somewhere a reader questioning how many Kindle books would be available for borrowing through the public library. That number is ultimately determined by the number of books that your library purchases through Overdrive and Amazon to make available through the service. Despite all the chatter about new models for publishing and accessing books in the e-book era, the basics of how libraries operate haven’t changed. The library purchases books using its budget and then lends them out to patrons, whether in print or electronic formats. The kerfluffle that arose when Harper Collins told libraries through its distributor Overdrive that their e-books would be limited to 26 circulations was a conflict over terms, not a change in the basic economics of running a library. So, although Amazon makes hundreds of thousand of books available through its store, you will only be borrowing those that your library purchases.

2. The borrowing process is handled through your Amazon account, not through Overdrive or your library. This means, of course, that any patron with a Kindle and without and Amazon account cannot ultimately borrow books from the library. Not a bad deal for Amazon, which makes buying opportunities available during the borrowing process. Given the seamless and slick way that Amazon handles book transmission, this may be a small price to pay. Sometimes the best systems are inherently commercial. Think Apple. It is just a shift from the hardy, noncommercial independence of most public libraries.

3. The books you borrow can only be sent to your Kindle via wifi. It seems like a reasonable limitation, unless you have a Kindle that predates the inclusion of wifi on the device. Those early Kindles will have to be manually loaded–books will have to be downloaded to your computer first and dragged into the documents folder of a Kindle that has been attached via USB to the computer. Hmmm, not ideal. But it reflects Amazon’s growing reliance on wifi over 3G or Whispersync–the new Fire tablet doesn’t even have a 3G option–strictly wifi. So, for older Kindle owners (or should I say, owners of older Kindles), you have now officially caught up with with Sony and all the other devices that have supported this kind of borrowing for years.

But for all the schools that have been investing in Kindles for years, this is a wonderful development. Now the resources of the local public library can be used to augment the school’s collection when it comes to the very activity that seems to boost reading achievement more than anything else. And that secret activity is–drum roll please!–wait for it–reading. Kids who have greater access and greater choice in their reading get better at reading, sometimes really quickly. So, youth of America, obtaining a library card just took on new meaning. Go get one and borrow a book that you want to read on your Kindle today!

Amazon recognizes the problem, according to the article from Reuters: “Undifferentiated or barely differentiated versions of the same book don’t improve the customer experience,” Amazon spokeswoman Sarah Gelman wrote in a June 14 email to Reuters. “We have processes to detect and remove undifferentiated versions of books with the goal of eliminating such content from our store.”

Amazon is to be credited with policing the store to reduce this glut of public domain titles that were easy to list and sell in the past, creating really muddy results for users. Now, the problem is a glut of seemingly useful titles, not redo’s of public domain works, that seem to operate like, well, spam in their attempt to get you to read them, indeed buy them, before you discover that they are essentially advertisements or worse.

From the Reuters article:

Some of these books appear to be outright copies of other work. Earlier this year, Shayne Parkinson, a New Zealander who writes historical novels, discovered her debut “Sentence of Marriage” was on sale on Amazon under another author’s name.

The issue was initially spotted and then resolved by customers through Amazon’s British online forum.

“How did I feel? Shocked and somewhat incredulous, but at the same time, because of the way I found out, very grateful that someone had taken the trouble to let me know,” Parkinson said.

Kindle spam has been growing fast in the last six months because several online courses and, ironically, ebooks have been released that teach people how to create a Kindle book per day, according to Paul Wolfe, an Internet marketing specialist.

One tactic involves copying an ebook that has started selling well and republishing it with new titles and covers to appeal to a slightly different demographic, Wolfe explained.

This is a problem with many tentacles. The very virtues of digital text praised in these posts for over two years become vices when there is no natural way of regulating the proliferation of words. “This is why email spam has become such a problem — it costs nothing” says one expert cited in the article. “If people can put out 12 versions of a single book under different titles and authors, and at different prices, even if they sell just one or two books, they can make money.” For educators, the problems that have arisen regarding the digital distribution of term papers come from the same source. Someone once called the internet “a giant copy machine,” and here is where we see that principle at work.

So what can you do to avoid purchasing a spam book? What characteristics of spam books can you teach your students to look out for in their searches?

Piotr Kowalczyk, self-published author and blogger at eBookFriendly.com, has complied a guide to spam book identification. Here is our summary of his findings and recommendations.

First, take a close look at the title. Is  the title wordy and extensive? If the title of the book seems to be cramming as many keywords in as possible, often displaying the key search terms in all caps, you may have some spam on your hands.

Next, take a look at the author. Does the author seem to write in a variety of topics- from Italian cookbooks to auto mechanics? Authors who seem to be very thinly spread over a variety of topics may also be an indication that the book you are looking at isn’t the one you desire. One should also steer clear of e-books that have no author listed, but instead an editor.

What about the cover? A poorly designed cover that features generic font choices and pixilated images also can serve as a red flag. If the image remains poor quality once enlarged, this often indicates that this image was taken from the web.

The price of the book may also confirm your suspicions. Spam books are often priced at $ 0.99 to entice a reader to purchase the book without downloading a free sample (beware of the free sample: malicious links are often placed in the opening pages of an e-book to ensure their viewing). The price may exceed $ 0.99, but this is a common characteristic of e-book spam that one should take notice of.

Although this next tip may seem obvious, one should still make note of it: the book will often have no Reviews and Ratings, or terrible reviews. Heed these reviews!

However, do not base your decision on the seeming popularity of the text as gauged by the Amazon Bestseller Rank, since people buy these spam book unintentionally and consequently improve the spam’s popularity. When looking on Amazon’s best seller list, however, you may want to notice what categories the book is listed under (unrelated, irrelevant?), and if the text is listed under both books and Kindle Store.

Notice the product description which in cases of spam is often short, poorly written, or a random book excerpt. Look to see if there are any other versions of the e-book available (print, audio). If the e-book is spam, the e-book edition will be your only option. Check the e-book’s file size; spam books have a small file size indicating a short book.

Thanks to Piotr for this helpful analysis. Sadly, even for books, if it’s digital it can be spammed. Knowing the signs of spam-books is just another one of those 21^st-century skills you need to help your students acquire.

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.

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 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.)

And now, with the advent of the iPad in education, Apple proposes to increase its lead by continuing its educator-friendly policies. We just got our iPad 2 through the educator section of the Apple site and, although the discount amounts to free shipping for an individual educator, there is a presence at Apple that supports and solicits educational use of its products. Now, the “Volume Purchasing Program” that Apple offers for the “apps” that drive the use of the iPad ensures that educators can access and use the iPad in the classroom without petitioning the company for a way to do so.

Amazon could tear a page from this playbook if it were truly interested in seeing the Kindle make a mark in schools around the country.

In a statement, the publisher justified the action by saying  “this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our authors and ensure a presence in public libraries and the communities they serve for years to come.” The number of circs was selected based on factors including the wear and tear on print books, and a library’s need to replace these copies as they wear out. Someone posted a picture of a print book that had been circulated twenty-six times. It appeared to be in pretty good shape.

So what is the upshot of this particular e-book kerfluffle? Well, the first point to be made is that now that e-books are becoming a significant part of their businesses, publishers must rethink the pricing model for the book as a digital rather than a physical item. From that perspective, the HarperCollins move is not so off-the-wall. In a recent front page story in the New York Times, Lisa Sampley, a librarian in Springfield, MO, says ““I can see their side of it.”

I’m hoping that if other publishers try to change the model, they think about the libraries and how it will affect us. But I’m sure there is some kind of model that could work for us both.

That conciliatory tone has not been matched, however, by librarians who felt “gobsmacked” by the change in policy. A website, BoycottHarperCollins.com, was established to serve as a clearing house for information about the change. Several terrific resources are linked at the site:

Bobbi Newman, at Librarian by Day, has put together a great collection of links to what librarians have written about this issue. We also recommend reading what Kate Sheehan has written about this issue at Loose Cannon Librarian.

Special Note to Kindle Owners: Of course, for now, this policy change doesn’t affect you, since the Kindle does not support library borrowing of e-books. This is convenient for Amazon, as it has its hands full battling publishers over their first salvo in the battle to control the monetization structure of e-book publishing, the imposition of the “agency model” on e-book distributors like Amazon.

HarperCollins’ move is cut from the same cloth. A digital book–a file really, a file like a music file or an image file–has different properties than a print book. So, what does it mean to “own” a digital file like an e-book? We learned a lot about that when, in an earlier e-book kerfluffle, Amazon removed improperly licensed copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm from the Kindles of people who thought they had purchased and now “owned” the book. This represents the equivalent, in the world of print books, of a company sending its hip-booted minions into your house at night to retrieve a book that it deems doesn’t belong to you any more. Ownership that can be revoked by the push of a button is a kind of ownership that feels strange and new and a little bit scary to a lot of folks.

Now, what you can’t do with an e-book is well-documented. You can’t sell it, you can barely lend it (sometimes), and you can’t read it on any old device you happen to have sitting around. Can you imagine this scene from 2025: “Dad, where is the old Kindle that your copy of Going Rogue is on?” Until the demise of DRM, something that has happened in the world of downloadable music, the publisher clearly has more control over the content than you do.

So, owning an e-book mostly means that you have paid a fee to have access to it under conditions determined by the publisher and the distributor. HarperCollins is simply asserting its control over that e-book file. For libraries, it is as though the book has become equivalent to other digital resources, like a web-database or online service that libraries already purchase on a subscription basis. You pay by the amount of access you get, and that access is not unlimited. Usually, you get access for a period of time, like a year.

So what is the kind of model that, in Lisa’s words, “could work for us both”?

Maybe the right plan for e-book lending is some kind of “metered” access to the content. I, the library, will pay for exactly as many circulations as I need, neither more nor fewer. So I don’t have to buy even twenty-six circulations for a book that is checked out twice, and I can determine just how available I want to make the bestsellers which will circulate many more than twenty-six times. The kind of agreement that Lisa Sampley is looking for would establish the cost of a circulation at a price which won’t drive publishers–or libraries–out of business. Then, publishers do well when bestsellers drive a lot of circulations, and libraries are not forced to eat the cost of books that are flops. If the e-book costs the library $9.99, then the price of a circulation is about $0.38. In a perfect digital world, such an approach would help libraries budget more accurately for materials. If every book cost $0.38 per circulation, then a library that has 10,000 e-book check-outs per year can do the math to see what it needs to spend–$3,800.

Publishers like HarperCollins, who introduced this topic, may not like this approach, though, because it is more profitable to sell all titles at the same price, thereby charging the same for a dog as a hit, and then sell additional copies of the hit. They make money in both transactions. In the present case, they have decided that you must purchase twenty-six copies of the book at $0.38 per copy, whether you need that many copies or not. The real push back here for libraries is to accept the HarperCollins premise, and then push for metered rather than fixed pricing. Wonder how HarperCollins would respond to that?

But that is where the current kerfluffle is headed. And if libraries want to get on offense here, they need to take HarperCollins’s plan and insist on a single administrative change: let us purchase e-books on a per circulation basis, they need to say, rather than pretend that the e-book is a “package” of twenty-six circulations.My guess is that the price per circulation that keeps publishers and libraries both in business is higher than thirty-eight cents, but this would be a more transparent pricing system than the one proposed by HarperCollins.

1.  Sharing (books among devices on one account)

2.  Lending and Borrowing (books among all users)

3.  Library Lending (books to patrons of the library)

Sharing E-books among Devices on One Account

When Amazon came out with the Kindle, the company realized that book-buyers would want to be able to load their purchases onto more than one reading device. So the company made it possible for customers to load their purchases onto as many as six devices, in most case, if the devices were registered to the same account. As schools began to implement ereader programs, educators saw the benefit of this policy: if a school purchases six or more Kindle, every book they buy can be distributed to six devices, effectively cutting the cost of an already lower-priced e-book by a factor of six. It is like buying six copies for the price of one. And with a little extra management, this “sharing” of books among devices registered to the same account has worked well. Here is how it works for the three major booksellers:

• Amazon Kindle: You can download up to six copies of each book to different platforms.
• Nook/Nook Color: You can download each book within devices on an account, limit six.
• iBooks: You can share among i-devices registered to the same iTunes account. (More info here…)

But…once you have shared the maximum number of times, the sharing stops (at least for Kindle and Nook). This means that once you have assigned the book to the allowed number of devices, those devices “own” those books and they cannot be pulled back into the archive and assigned to other devices. If they could, each book could be downloaded to different devices infinitely, which is clearly not what the publishers want.

Lending E-Books to Someone Not on the Same Account

When the Nook came out, the LendMe feature, which allows anyone to “lend” a book they own to another Nook owner, was unique, but now Amazon has finally matched the feature for Kindle.  Lending an e-book means allowing another reader with the same type of ereader to read a book in your library for two weeks.

But there are rather strict limits to this feature:

1. You can only lend a book once, period.
2. You can only lend for a two week period, period.
3. The book is unavailable to you for the two week lending period, period.
4. Not every e-book is lendable—publishers decide. Period.

Still, this means that an e-book you purchase behaves just a little bit more like a print copy of a book. Heck, half of the books we lend our friends never come back at all!  But consult the purchase details about each book you buy to see if it qualifies for lending. Surveys show that only about half of the e-books you can purchase qualify for lending/borrowing.

So how can I find a book to borrow?

A small cottage industry has sprung up in matching lenders with borrowers. Services to link the two over the Internet began when Barnes and Noble introduced the feature over a year ago, and has gained momentum now that Amazon has joined the party. Here are just a few:

• Kindle Lending Club
• LendInk
• eBookFling

You can read a brief description of each of these services (and more) by clicking here.

Library Lending of E-Books

Finally, there is regular old-fashioned library lending of e-books. Most e-book library lending is based on devices that support Adobe Digital Editions software, which manages the digital licenses that allow books to be distributed to different users for a specified lending period.

Any computer can install the free Adobe Digital Editions software and borrow books from a lending organization, like your local public library. Often, a service like Overdrive is used to manage the whole process, which supports placing a hold on books that are currently checked out. (E-book lending, like physical book lending, restricts the use of the book to one reader at a time.)

For schools, finding a reader that supports library lending and borrowing could vastly expand the number of books available to your students. Right now, among the popular readers, the following do support this feature:

• Nook and Nook Color
• Sony, all models
• iPad (if you install the Bluefire Reader)
• Others, including Android, may be included soon…

So, those are your choices. As I survey the landscape, it seems to me that these strategies offer differing value to educators, so I have ranked them here for your consideration:

• Lending and Borrowing (books among all users) – value to educators? 4 out of 10
• Sharing (books among devices on one account)– value to educators? 8 out of 10
• Library Lending (books to patrons of the library) – value to educators? 9 out of 10

This information is the subject of a 30-minute webinar, which you can view by clicking here.

So, the drift in Kindle design has been toward reducing features that make it easy to obtain books from other sources (remember the SD card slot from the Kindle 1?) and making it even easier to buy books from Amazon. (Don’t bother citing the studies that I am sure were conducted to say that this was done because this is what Amazon customers told the company they want.) The problem is that most schools want to do the book buying, and they usually discourage student activities which result in unapproved purchases that appear on the district’s monthly statement. In fact, the workaround in Pinellas County to allow students with Kindles (yes, all 2,000) of them to choose and purchase books for the dedicated ereader the school mandated they carry around with them every day is that the students and their families can “donate” books to the district by purchasing them for the Kindle, but cannot own them outright. Do you see where this is going?

Enter the new firmware upgrade for the Barnes and Noble Nook (released a few months ago–I imagine it has hit most Nooks in captivity by this time). One feature of the upgrade is to add a password option for the book purchasing problem. Now, you can password the device itself, as you can also do with the Kindle (generation 2 and 3), but on the Nook (and, apparently, NOT on the NOOKcolor), under Settings you will find the option to require a password for book purchases from the B&N Store.

How to do? Turn on the Nook and select Settings from the colorful menu across the bottom (hit the little “n” above the screen to awaken if dark). In the resulting menu, choose Device and then “Enable purchase password protection.”  You will then be asked to enter the password on the account to which the Nook is registered. Voila! No books can be purchased from the device without entering the password.

Now I would have preferred the ability to set any password to prevent unauthorized buying, but I guess it makes sense to require the account password to be used. That makes it uniform for all Nooks on that account, and it doesn’t create another password for you to try to manage. But it does argue for unguessable passwords. No more “cougars” and “titans” for the Nooksters among us!

So, this is just one little control, and I can’t reasonably make the argument that B&N listened to educators in any special way when they added it. But score another one for the last, best bookstore around! In the Amazon star chamber, no controls are going to be approved that would hobble (or insert a moment’s pause into) buying something. And maybe Barnes and Noble is making the kind of business mistake that folks like Amazon and Apple avoid at all costs. But, for once, a commonsense improvement that does nothing more than give users more control of their ereader device has been made available, and educators have yet another reason to look somewhere other than the Kindle when they expand their students’ access to books with digital text and mobile reading platforms.