Tag Archive for content

What’s wrong with Clean Reader? Maybe nothing…

When I asked educators about the usefulness of Clean Reader, the responses were definitive. Teachers don’t like it. It smacks of censorship. It dilutes the purpose of art, or worse–it bastardizes it in the name of correctness. One teacher said that the app is “a violation of all of the principles of intellectual freedom that…

Does My Kindle Book Have Real Page Numbers?

August 23, 2016 – Update: Amazon recently introduced a feature that takes real page numbers to a whole new level. The feature is called Page Flip. It allows you to “step back” from the page you are currently reading on Kindle or Kindle Reader and navigate around the book without ever losing your place. You can…

The New Kindle Lineup: What It Means to Educators

Just a quick update on the new lineup of Kindles announced earlier this month: as ever, the new Kindle models have one key audience in mind – the individual consumer. Backlight for reading in bed, integration with a vast media library, seamless purchasing opportunities, high resolution screen, touch navigation, whiter backgrounds, the works! All improvements…

6 Reasons to Love the Textbooks from CK12

The free and open textbook industry has made great strides in the past few years. There are numerous open source textbook projects cranking away right now, and one of them Flat World Knowledge, even intends to build a business on the concept. A quick Googling of the words “open source textbook” will give you a…

More Research Says Bigger Fonts Help Kids Read

Once I started digging in to why everyone seems to crank up the font size on the Kindle, more and more evidence has been sent my way. I want to thank Kerrie Smith, the Australian teacher and LEO at Education.au, for pointing out another significant research compilation on the importance of variable text size. This…

Running the Kindle on Windmill Power in Ghana

Got a great note from Zev Lowe, one of the intrepid Kindle folks who are taking the Kindle to places unimaginable in order to help kids learn to read. Currently, Zev’s organization, WorldReader.org, is running a Kindle trial in a village in Ghana. When the WorldReader team discovered that the Kindles’ batteries were almost dead,…

eReadUps Launched: Build Your Own Kindle Book

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…