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!

The action in this area, though, has been largely restricted to post-secondary texts, and the needs of underfunded college students. Some of the revolution happened, I think, because someone saw a business model that would work to meet their needs, and some of it happened because the kids had taken to scanning their texts and sharing them online via data torrents. (Funny how many times the Internet has spawned a business area by making illegal activity such as pirating intellectual property so darned easy. See Napster.)

But recent developments mean that the wait is over for K-12 educators who want to join the open source party. Enter CK12.org, an organization founded by former Sun Microsystems folks. (Funny how many times the Internet has spawned not-for-profit helping organizations with money made from the massive profits in enterprise hardware and software sales. See Bill Gates.)

CK12 has been on a mission to “reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide.” The website tells us that they plan to do this by “pioneer[ing] the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning.”

In practice, this means that they are creating textbooks in key subject areas for secondary school educators and releasing them under a non-restrictive Creative Commons license that allows everyone and anyone to download them for free and use them digitally, or pay a small fee to get them printed.

What is even more exciting for K-12 educators is that CK12 recently began offering its top completed textbooks in the popular ePub format for use on mobile reading platforms like the Nook, the Sony, and, through an arrangement with Amazon, the Kindle. (Note, as of this writing, these “open” textbooks come encapsulated in Amazon’s brand of DRM, so they cannot be freely distributed in the way that CK12 intends them to be. In practice, this means that each textbook download can be used only on the device that the DRM designates. Folks at CK12 have acknowledged to me in an email that they recognize that this approach violates the license that they have selected for release of the material, and that they plan to rectify the situation. It should be noted that Amazon has the capability to release these books through its store without DRM, and the cause of its reluctance to do so will be left to the reader’s imagination to discern.)

What is so encouraging about this development is that it has occurred at all. So much of the “open educational resources” movement and the drive to aggregate and mash up these resources is being driven by a “print on demand” philosophy that to find a textbook creator sensitive to the future of mobile reading, its cost efficiencies, and its convenience, is a real pleasure.

So, what is so great about these textbooks from CK12? My six highlights:

1. They are free. No, really, free. (And when Amazon lifts its problematic DRM on these books, they will also be non-commercial.)

2. They have been created with with contemporary pedagogy in mind, by contemporary educators.

3. They are, in the parlance, “mashable.” Teachers may select those sections of the book that they want to use, access it, mix it up with other resources if they wish, and generate their own custom teaching tool. Really beats the inefficiency of the print textbook world where all the sections have to be included in every textbook, whether the teacher needs them or not. See a demo here.

4. They have already been mapped to standards.

5. The simple examples and diagrams reproduce well on the e-ink screen. (This, of course, is a relative statement. E-ink is not really designed for the kind of glorious full-color imagery of either 1) the print textbook itself, 2) the print textbook transferred to a web page, or 3) the textbook formatted for a full-color tablet like the iPad.) Try the Chemistry text as an example: click for ePub download from CK12, or for Kindle download from Amazon. (Image to right is page on cathode ray tube displayed on Kindle Gen 3.)

6. And finally, the sine qua non of truly open education projects, CK12, like Wikipedia, Connexions, and others, encourages you to add, subtract, and edit anything that will make the materials better for your purposes. They say it best themselves: “CK-12 allows one to customize and produce content by re-purposing to suit what needs to be taught, using different modules that may suit a learner’s learning style, region, language, or level of skill, while adhering to the local education standards.” Amen! The new age of the customized curriculum is actually dawning, and CK12 and others are leading the way in allowing educators to make what they need rather than work with what they are given.

Of course, anything this new and revolutionary poses some challenges, and CK12 names two of them:

• “Changing the mindsets of educators who claim not having the time to contribute, CK-12 needs active community involvement”
• “Keeping content contextualized to local, regional requirements as well as curriculum standards globally”

“Changing the mindsets”–a worthy goal. The tagline at the CK12 site says “Download. Customize. Print. Share.” I would only change one thing for the readers of this blog, which explores ereaders in education. I think the tagline should read:

Download. Customize. Print. Share.

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.

When I got my first Kindle two years ago, I could see a time when loads of books could be delivered to readers in remote places by shipping them via Kindle. WorldReader is doing that today. Their “mission” statement, from the top of their blog, is simple:

Worldreader aims to put a library of books in the hands of families worldwide, using e-reader technology.

The organization’s website goes a bit further:

Worldreader.org is developing the systems and the partnerships to get e-readers — and the life-changing, power-creating ideas contained in e-books — into the hands and minds of people in the developing world, where profit-seeking entities are not focused.

You can learn a lot about the project trial from the blog. Zev writes:

These kids are amazing — they’re aged from 11 to 14, many of them are orphans and new to reading, but they’re already hooked on Magic Treehouse and Curious George. Most recently, our blog covers how the people in the village of Ayenyah, Ghana – from the chief to the kids – reacted to the Kindle.

To get into the spirit of things, I created a couple of eReadUps for the kids: one on Curious George, its author, its publication history, and more, and one on the Under-20 Football Team in Ghana. Click on the titles to download these eReadUps in Kindle format to read for yourself, if you like.

Here’s hoping that WorldReader will achieve its goal and “give kids in developing countries access to a whole library of books using e-reader technology.” Of all the gifts to bring young people, the gift of reading may be the most significant for the future of the planet. Bravo!

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!)

So I used Kindlepedia to make an article on LCross, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, from the page at Wikipedia. You can download it here.

One nice feature of viewing this article on Kindle for PC is that all the external links are live, meaning that you can follow all the footnotes and references to their sources. Of course, you can also use those links if you are reading on your Kindle and the Whispernet wireless connection is on.

At any rate, we are back on the moon, and the article points out that the results from LCROSS are expected to have a big impact on a decision about whether we ever could colonize the moon. With the amount of water kicked up by this little rock-throwing experiment, I’d say the future of the moon looks bright.

One of my reasons for thinking so has to do with the Kindle’s almost seamless connection with the mother ship at Amazon. When the Kindle came out I was struck by Amazon’s brilliant step forward with the ereader by making it a part of a business system. The unexpected addition of the wireless lifeline to the world’s biggest bookstore brought the value proposition of ereaders and ebooks into crystal clarity for me in a heartbeat.

But that very same tethering of the device to Amazon’s cloud of convenience poses what some see as a “darker” side of the device. In several lucidly argued posts, Ted Striphas raises the concern:

I’m rather taken with the idea of a right to read given the ways in which new e-book systems, such as the Amazon Kindle, tether reading to corporate custodians who in turn mine the machines for intimate details about how people read.

Striphas’s concern is one that resonates even more powerfully in the age of the Patriot Act:

The [Kindle] automatically archives detailed, even intimate, information about what and more importantly how people read on the Amazon server cloud.  This kind of information [...] can instead be subpoenaed by prosecutors who are anxious to dig up dirt on suspects.  The question I raise in the speech, and the question that also seems to emerge in the case of Google Books and the coming Editions service, is, what happens to a society when privacy is no longer the default setting for reading?

That’s a little bit scary, and gives me pause. (Not that I am reading anything I shouldn’t be. Really.)

It’s just that we have so many examples of how centralized control of media historically reverts to commercial or political exploitation. A hegemonistic book authority could easily limit or control people’s reading for its own purposes. Look, for example, at the situation in medieval Europe before Gutenberg hit the scene, or at what happened last summer when, for all the best corporate reasons in the world, Amazon remotely deleted a book from its customers’ Kindles without asking or even warning them.

If it is reasonable, and I think it is, to see Amazon as the “custodian” of our books and our reading history and our notes and our marks and our highlights, then we may have a problem, since we depend on the idea that the interests and intentions of our custodians are benign, at least, and certainly not pitted against our own. And yet the relationship with this corporate custodian is that of a vendor and a customer, two roles that overlap in certain areas but certainly not in all. Trusting that free market forces will reign in abuse–well, that premise is somewhat out of favor these days.

Striphas summarizes his concern:

As these devices become more prevalent, I worry about the effects they might have on how people practice and conceive of reading.  Until now it was relatively difficult to monitor closely how and what people read.  What will become of reading, and people’s relationship to it, once that freedom is definitively diminished?  Indeed, a right to read seems to me of paramount importance in a context where someone is looking over your shoulder every time that you open an electronic book or periodical.

Yes, I guess we do have a problem.

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.

For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

For all you Kindlefolk, here is Teddy’s life captured from the up-to-the-minute Wikipedia in pristine mobi-formatting if you want to revisit the scope of the life of this great American: Ted Kennedy from Wikipedia.

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.