EduKindle

The first hint of the problem started popping up at the end of the school year in May. Kathy Burnette, a member of the Kindle Educators Group over at the Ning, summed up her problem in a post:

ARGH! We are not allowed to purchase gift cards using our purchase order accounts and that means I have no way to purchase the Kindle even though I have money. We received the check but it’s made out to our school. This means it must go into a school account and we must use a purchase order. Not quite sure what to do next…

She needed what I am beginning to call a “Kindle Workaround” to purchase her Kindles, and, a few days later, the absence of said workaround let to her next post, entitled We Had to Get Nooks!: ” Our Purchasing Department does not want us to use Amazon and they are in control of the Grant Funds.” So Kathy is now blazing the trail of using the Barnes and Noble Nook as the ereader at her school.

So, what is the “Kindle Workaround” that Kathy needed to purchase those Kindles? That’s the topic of today’s post.

First, you need to find a link at the Amazon website that, while not hidden, certainly isn’t obvious to the casual user. That is the link for “Corporate Accounts,” toward the bottom of the left sidebar on the main Amazon page. Diane Bushman, the board secretary for the Seneca Grade School (Seneca CCSD #170) outside Chicago, tells me that once you find this link, setting Amazon up as a vendor is pretty much the same process as setting up any other vendor for your district. The steps in the process are as follows:

1. Click on Corporate Accounts link at Amazon.com
2. Scroll down to Corporate Accounts by Segment
3. Click on the box labeled K-12 Schools
4. Below the intro you will see “Purchase Order Payment: Apply for an Amazon.com Corporate Credit Line to pay by PO”
5. Click the link “Amazon Corporate Credit Line” to set your school up for purchase using a P.O.
6. On the application page, you will be offered the chance to apply for a “Pay In Full” line or a “Revolving” line
(Note: Dianne opted for the “Pay In Full” line as she planned to pay for the Kindles in full once she got her invoice)
7. Once you select the type of line you want to apply for, you will be asked to log into Amazon
(In Seneca’s case, Dianne used the account associated with the purchasing card that they typically use for Amazon purchases)
8. Set up your corporate account and provide the application information required on the following screens

Dianne mentioned that approval for a $5,000 line of credit was painless and took a couple of days to complete. (Note that the Amazon.com Corporate Account Credit Line is issued by GE Money Bank, so you are dealing with a third party provider when you put in your app.)

BUT, since Seneca was interested in purchasing 80 Kindles, the $5,000 line of  credit was insufficient. This triggered a more involved but straightforward process of getting an adequate line approved, which involved providing GE Money Bank with the district’s financials. Again, Dianne found this part of the process took a bit more time and a call or two to the help line (number provided on the site), but was straightforward. In a few more days, SGS received approval for the appropriate line and then received its 80 Kindles just a few days later. (And that’s when I showed up to participate in the Kindle set-up procedure with Kathy, as detailed in my earlier posts.)

So, aside from the relative merits of purchasing Nooks rather than Kindles (and that is a reasonable debate–see Kathy Burnette’s comparison of the two devices here), no one has to feel that they can’t purchase their Kindles with a purchase order. You can. It’s just that your business office will have to cooperate and jump through Amazon’s hoops to set up an account. I believe that one reason schools that buy Nooks do so is that they already have a corporate account set up with Barnes and Noble. No problem! the news here is that you can do the same with Amazon.

(And now that it looks like the price war between Kindle and Nook will squeeze out many smaller players in the ereader manufacturing and sales arena, getting an account set up with both of these mega-vendors may be the best idea of all.)

Once Kathy’s helper-husband Steve had all the Kindles out of their boxes, numbered with stickies, and charging peacefully, the time had come for Kathy to swing into action. It was time to reconnect each Kindle with the Amazon software that would allow Kathy to manage content for each of the Kindles online. Unlike you or me, whose Kindle comes pre-registered and assigned a name at Amazon, Kathy has to manually register each of the school’s Kindles individually on the “Manage My Kindle” page. This requires another serial operation: taking each of the charged and operable Kindles (remember, Kathy checks for lemons before registering each Kindle), affixing a district inventory control sticker to the back of each device (again, hard to return a defective Kindle that has a sticker on it), and then sitting down at the computer to input the serial number of each Kindle. Ugh.

Where do you get the serial number? Well, it is printed in extremely small print on the back of each device (have your magnifying glass handy if you look there), so Kathy takes the serial number off the box each Kindle came in. This is why it’s important to keep the Kindles numbered from the beginning, and also to jot the number on the box itself when you put the sticky on the Kindle. (Kathy keeps the box associated with each Kindle around in case the Kindle has to go back–apparently Amazon likes it that way.)  Ugh.

OK, anyway, now it is time to put that serial number from the box into the Manage My Kindle page at the mother ship, which will enable Kathy to track her content downloads to specific devices, even if it is a broken Kindle that a student has brought back to her. Registered properly, “Kathy’s 53rd Kindle” will mean the same thing to Amazon as it does to Kathy, and as it does to the student who has it in her bookbag. It is time for Kindle to Phone Home.

If this is beginning to sound like an assembly line operation, well, that’s because it is. Sitting at her desk, Kathy calls out for one of the helpers to bring her a stack of charged and stickered Kindles. Not just any stack, but the one with the next Kindle number in her system. Why? Because when Kathy registers the next Kindle, Amazon will assign it the next number in its sequence, meaning that if Amazon knows that Kathy has 52 Kindles, the next one she registers will become “Kathy’s 53rd Kindle” by default. No time for confusion this. The conversation goes as follows:

Kathy: I’m ready for more Kindles!

Helper: What number are you on?

Kathy: 54.

Helper: You have Kindle 54 or you need Kindle 54?

Kathy: I need Kindle 54.

Helper: Ok, who has Kindle 54?

Helper 2: I think its on the table by the door.

Helper: No, this says Kindle 78.

Helper 2: Maybe it’s in the server room.

Helper: I’ll look.

You get the picture. Registering the Kindle that has the number 55 on its back in the 54th position, a misstep with grave consequences if not noticed immediately, is to be avoided at all costs. So an orderly exchange of Kindles is essential at the moment of registration.

On the Manage My Kindle page, Kathy scrolls down to the “Register a new Kindle” link at the bottom of her list of Kindles and clicks it, opening a text box into which she can type the serial number from the box. Sixteen digits in, a push of the button, and that Kindle is officially connected to home base. Kindle Phoned Home. On to the next. Eighty times. Ugh.

But, you know, it was kind of fun. Kathy is so enthusiastic about the benefit to her kids that the time flies with smiles all around. In May, Kathy put out a tweet about how much the Kindles meant to the kids at her school this year:

8th grader 2 mention being first “Kindle 8th Graders” in her commencement speech tonight. Jeff Bezos you impacted ed.

Whether you meant to or not, Jeff Bezos, you impacted ed.

I had the pleasure of spending a day with Kathy Parker last week to learn how she sets up all the Kindles the district purchased for Seneca Grade School’s entire eighth class for the coming school year. It is quite a process! I have noted in many previous posts that the Amazon Kindle is first and foremost a device designed for individual consumers, and the ways in which Amazon’s focus on the individual consumer limits the use of the device for academic purposes. For example, those of you who have commented on the post Page Number versus Position on the Kindle know that creating footnotes that reference specific places in the text of an ebook on the Kindle presents a hurdle. In addition, students who used the Kindle DX in university trials this past year generally gave the device low marks for academic use, mainly because it is difficult to flip pages to find a passage quickly and accurately, and because the device has limited note-taking functionality. What the college students liked about the Kindle were the same things that consumers like: the portability, the congenial e-ink screen, and the ability to access books wirelessly in an instant.

Well, Amazon’s consumer bias also makes setting up multiple devices a chore for folks like Kathy. The system is designed to work with a single device, or a few that a family might have on a single Amazon account. So, setting up 80 Kindles at a time involves repeating a process that a consumer might do once eighty times in a row. And that’s before you even start downloading books to the devices, another serial process that must be repeated 80 times for each book you want to put on all the Kindles.

But all of this didn’t seem to disturb good-natured Kathy, pictured above with the author, near the table where a dozen of the new Kindles were receiving their first charge. Kathy immediately starts the charging process once she gets the Kindle boxes open so that she can tell right away if there is a defective Kindle among the bunch. So far, on this shipment, she has only found one, which Amazon will quickly replace.

As she sets the Kindles up for charging, Kathy also numbers the Kindles with a sticky note. This step accomplishes a few things. First, it creates the first identifier that Kathy will use to record the Kindle in her district inventory. Second, it tells Kathy where each Kindle stands in the queue to be registered in her Kindle account at Amazon. Linking the physical number of the Kindle to the name that the Kindle will ultimately hold in the Amazon system (e.g. “Kathy’s 52nd Kindle,” visible at the top of each device’s Home screen) is key to managing content on the individual Kindles once they are in the hands of students.

But I have gotten a step ahead of myself. You can’t get to this stage until you have opened up each Kindle’s packaging by pulling the little tab across the end of the tight little box the Kindles come in. (Anyone remember the big, white book-like enclosures for the first generation of Kindles?) Kathy’s assistant in the process, husband Steve (himself principal of a nearby school that is using Kindles), showed me what a chore that is, since the tabs don’t really sit up where you can pull on them. For this batch of Kindles, at least, a fingernail couldn’t quite do the job (and I tried it myself!). Steve discovered that some kind of implement is required–a letter opener or pocket knife–to lift the tab so the sealing strip can be pulled off and the Kindle liberated for use. This seems like a small thing but, repeated eighty or a hundred times, it adds a significant step to the batch processing of Kindles for student use.

Once the Kindles are opened, labeled, and charged, they are ready to be registered with Amazon. The details of that procedure will follow in Part 2 of this post.

Can’t find the expansion slot for additional memory on your Kindle 2? That’s because there isn’t one. And, as I have indicated in earlier posts, that’s not a good deal for educators.

This change seems to be part of the “closing” of the Kindle, where a sleek form factor trumps functionality. If the Kindle is to become the go-to reader of choice, it needs to be more rather than less useful; the device does not yet support folders, so keeping things on different chips was one potential way to store and organize your library. This removal of the SD slot also eliminates the possibility of a third-party vendor (I can hear the boos and hisses from Seattle) offering formatted books on a chip to readers. With 1) wifi that is hard to turn off and 2) no chip slot, you are pretty much left with the Kindle Store as your source of books.

And this is as it should be–in a retail universe.

But for schools, we need something more adaptable to different situations and uses. To the extent that the DX follows the design of the K2, it will fall far short of its promise as a device that could make sense in a classroom.

There is another way in which Amazon is “veering away from supporting educational uses.” The Kindle 2 actually makes it harder to manage the settings of the device. How? Most importantly, the Kindle 2 pushes the wifi “on/off” setting into a menu and removes the button from the exterior of the device. Stylish, yes. Helpful, no.

OK, I am an admitted battery life freak. So maybe I am overreacting to the fact that I would have to open up a menu on the device to toggle the wifi on and off. And I also admit that my whining on this topic sounds remarkably like the whining about “new new” things that I deplore when others do it. BUT, this innovation of removing the wifi switch from the exterior of the device encourages the user to keep the wifi ON (all the easier to buy books with, my dear).

For me, I watch that switch on the back of my Kindle 1 like a hawk, and even audibly sigh when I notice that I left the darned thing on for hours without realizing it. Because of that switch, I can check and adjust the wifi setting when the Kindle is 1) in display mode, 2) off, and 3) in sleep mode. The user of the Kindle 2 can perform that check when the Kindle is 1) in display mode, 2) um, oh yeah, that’s it.

Now one of the great advantages of my Kindle over my iPhone is battery life. A key feature that gives the Kindle (and other e-ink readers) promise in the educational space is the low power requirement. That advantage is eroded by anything that fails to optimize power management. Clearly, the Kindle 2 makes it harder to manage battery life. (Plus, I’m thinking that 3G network chews power even more than the old-style Whispernet, even if I stipulate that the Kindle 2 has better battery life than the Kindle 1.)

Next: Why Educators Should Mourn the Departure of the SD Chip Slot from the Kindle 2

OK, ket’s be fair. Amazon created the Kindle as a consumer device for reading books, novels primarily, with a little assistance on the side for newspapers, magazines, and blogs. As a business system, the device actualized the ebook value chain for the biggest etailer of books on the planet. It only makes sense.

It also makes sense that Amazon struggles with how to protect that value chain. The problems are obvious and much-commented: there’s DRM (to ensure control of the content), there’s the exclusivity of the system and the device (to ensure control of the channel), there’s the limited capability (to ensure the Kindle doesn’t serve a lot of purposes that Amazon doesn’t have in mind or become, gasp, an “open” device).

But despite these limitations, some of us took one look and saw the potential for this device to actualize another value chain, the delivery of educational materials to students. It isn’t what Amazon intended, and the Kindle 2 demonstrates that Amazon is actually veering away from supporting educational uses.

(But what about the BIG Kindle, you ask? More on that at another time. The announcement last week shows primarily Amazon’s canny awareness that this marketplace is about to get away from them, and that being first to market with a big reader, even if that reader isn’t ready for the market yet, is the only card they have left to play.)

So, what is it about the Kindle 2 that should be discouraging to educators?

1. This device actually moves away from encouraging user input. How? Look at the keyboard. I tried to type a little bit with those tiny pimples and found the process MORE difficult than with the little chicklets on the Kindle 1. Their layout seems to support the sleek design of the device rather than the user’s need to type quickly. For a consumer reading novels, not a biggie. For a student of teacher attempting to annotate a text, just a little more difficult than with the Kindle 1 keyboard. My guess is that these vestigial bumps will disappear when the Kindle acquires its MUST HAVE touchscreen for user input.

Next: Why Fewer Buttons On the Outside of the KIndle is Bad News for Educators