EduKindle

Should you de-synchronize your Kindle? As my lawyer might say, it depends.

Let me explain. Amazon makes it possible for you to read a book that you have purchased on whatever 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 all 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 no matter where you am 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 in any of them. 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.”

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. In this case, 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.

This conflict raises a special problem for teachers who may be leveraging the ability to load books on multiple devices and make more texts available to more students for the same price. What to do?

I only recently learned that you can “de-synchronize” the Kindles and other devices registered to a single account, and if the downside of synchronization is just too great–Josh keeps underlining all the text in everybody’s copy of Old Yeller–then it is easy to take care of the problem.

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 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, if a little bossy. 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.

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.

For all the users of Kindlepedia over the past year, I am delighted to announce that, in partnership with Joshua Tallent and the “talented” folks at eBook Architects, we are launching a new Kindle content tool called eReadUps. Like Kindlepedia, eReadUps builds Kindle-formatted books based on articles from the largest open source provider of information on the planet, Wikipedia.

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!)

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

One interesting feature of the Kindle loaner program at North Carolina State University is the way that books are selected for download to the 18 Kindles that are available for checkout. Patrons (including students and faculty) recommend titles through an online submission form (see screen shot) that is then vetted by library staff. More from the interview:

EduKindle: How are title requests submitted and processed?

NCSU: The collection of titles on our Kindles is totally patron driven. Patrons request titles and we purchase them and download them to the unit. This has resulted in a collection of mostly popular titles, although we also have the occasional reference work, such as the Handbook of Wood Chemistry and Wood Composites. It’s not all pop-fiction like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Twilight, but also serious non-fiction authors like Thomas L. Friedman, Fareed Zakaria and Michael Pollan.

You can view our Kindle Request Page here. When patrons click the ‘Submit’ button an email is generated with the data and sent to a handful of people who have authorization to purchase titles and prepare units for circulation. Patrons have to authenticate with their NCSU id and password to get to this page. They enter name and email and the titleauthor of the book they want. Clicking the ‘Add Another…’ button gives additional title/author boxes so several titles can be requested at once. A space for comments is a ‘just-in-case’ kinda thing, such as a patron wishing to clarify their priority order of texts. Just below the patron email field is the pickup location. In addition to D.H.Hill Library on the main campus, we have 4 branch library locations. We manage the Kindles centrally, but we’ll courier a unit to a patron at a branch library so they can pick it up at their own location.

The aforementioned form-generated email of the request is handled primarily by one person in my department. In her absence I’ll handle it, and at times when neither she nor I are present a progression of ‘next-in-line’ folks step up. This gives us coverage of Kindle requests for about 20 hours a day.

We have limited the Kindle content to books for now. We will at some point experiment with newspapers and magazines, but issues with simultaneously keeping that content current and our accounts secure have kept that expansion on the back burner for now.

EduKindle: Who manages the pool of books?

NCSU: It takes a village’ to manage the pool of titles purchased for our Kindles. Amazon notifies us of each title purchased by sending an email to a listserv we’ve created with folks from Acquisitions, Collection Management, Cataloging Metadata, and Research and Information Services (my department). Acquisitions set up the Amazon accounts we use to purchase titles, and they keep track of the money spent. (Their attention to detail allowed one Acquisitions staffer to catch a mistake Amazon made that allowed us to purchase accidentally a title twice on the same account, something that shouldn’t be possible. We got our money back!) Catalogers enter purchased titles into our OPAC. A collection manager keeps track of data such as how often a title purchased for the Kindle exists in our physical collection, whether a physical copy of a text is checked out when the Kindle version is purchased, and which of our Kindles hold which texts.

This process reminds me of the Kindles that Kathy Schrock describes in her school library from a post she made in June:

We have just purchased two Kindles for our high school library as a pilot, and I found out a couple of things. First, you can have up to 6 Kindles tied to one Amazon account, and, if you buy a single title, you are allowed to put it on all 6 of them.

Secondly, since any user of the Kindle can purchase a new title from the Kindle store from the Kindle itself, we did not know how we were going to control students from purchasing books on a whim. We are solving the problem by putting a gift certificate on the Amazon account with no other method of payment on the account. The teachers will spend the gift certificate funds to purchase a bunch of titles, so there will be no payment method available to purchase new titles by the users. We will just load the books up with the purchased titles.

These models show us the value of a reading device that can hold many titles, and that can involve students actively in building the library’s collection. It is kind of a “suggestion box 2.0″ for schools. And the fact that the titles you purchase can be downloaded to six different Kindles means that student choice and self-determination as readers is enhanced.

Cool beans.

Next time: What are the lessons learned at NCSU for Kindle loaner programs?

Kathy Schrock has a great solution for the “credit card enabled” aspect of the Kindle:

…since any user of the Kindle can purchase a new title from the Kindle store from the Kindle itself, we did not know how we were going to control students from purchasing books on a whim. We are solving the problem by putting a gift certificate on the Amazon account with no other method of payment on the account. The teachers will spend the gift certificate funds to purchase a bunch of titles, so there will be no payment method available to purchase new titles by the users. We will just load the books up with the purchased titles.

This raises so many interesting questions. One, kind of interesting to be thinking of ways to keep kids from obtaining more reading material. As i have thought about all of this additional functionality that the Kindle brings, the mind of this former principal slips easily into thinking about how to “defuse” the device into something that I could give to kids. Then I think, No! Why try to reduce this deviced to something that can only be used the way I say? If there is anything true about life in the world of new media, it is that all of these potentialities can never be completely stifled, no matter how hard we try.

Why not set up one Kindle and let the kids load it up with books?

(Ed. note: Further thoughts from from Kathy Schrock: “As we do in the real library, suggestions for purchases submitted by students will be considered for the Kindle as they are for print titles in the library. I was not suggesting that the educators would control the content purchased for the Kindle. I was suggesting that, for a district that does not have a credit card and needs to carefully control spending due to limited resources, the gift certificate option would allow a designated amount of money to be spent on titles suggested by staff or students at the school.”)