EduKindle

The remarkable finding that there is a LOT more water on the moon than previously thought makes for an excellent story in the annals of modern space science. I mean, quasars and pulsars and the like are pretty interesting, but what could be more fun to minds of a scientific bent than throwing a rock really hard at the moon and seeing what splashes up? (Thanks to NASA for the picture.)

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.

Yesterday, President Obama delivered a speech remarkable for its mainstream admonitions and for the brief firestorm of controversy it generated in the past week. Was the President trying to “politicize” the process of getting an education, as some critics suggested, or was he using the bully pulpit to encourage kids to crack the books? You be the judge. Here is the President’s speech, rendered in pristine condition for reading on your Kindle:

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama

What I liked reading in the coverage of the event were the comments of school children themselves, most of who were pretty impressed that the President would take the time to speak to them directly…about anything. How did your students react?

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.

In keeping with a little tradition here at EduKindle, I have formatted a copy of President Barack Obama‘s speech in Cairo early this morning for your reading pleasure on the Kindle. Just click here to download the file to your computer. Then connect the Kindle via USB cord and drag the file into the “documents” folder on your Kindle.

I have also formatted some background information about the speech from Wikipedia by using a new tool we have developed in conjunction with Joshua Tallent and his team at eBook Architects. You can download the backgrounder here, or scoot on over the the “Kindlepedia” tool and create a file on this or any other topic for yourself.

I know I am late, but I wanted to be sure to mention, on the 50th anniversary of “the day the music died,” that Staton Rabin has a new biography of Buddy Holly out, entitled OH BOY! The Life and Music of Rock ‘n’ Roll Pioneer Buddy Holly.  Staton is the author of several other books, including Betsy And The Emperor, The Curse Of The Romanovs, and Black Powder (published by Simon & Schuster), and Mr. Lincoln’s Boys (from Viking).

Yes, the 50th anniversary was yesterday.

This book is intended for younger readers, a group that thinks 50 years ago someone like, um, Eisenhower was president. But it works for us oldsters as well! In his review of the book, Kindle enthusiast Len Edgerly says that “the book…is full of joy and savvy appreciation of Buddy Holly’s place in the history of American music,” putting him “less at risk of becoming the most famous rock star that young people have never heard of.”

Thanks to Staton for this great contribution to the history of a generation of music lovers who were very much around 50 years ago and thanks, too, for making this book a “Kindle exclusive.”

I admit it, I cried like a baby. But I wiped away the tears and got the transcript to share with you, formatted for the Kindle. As simple as the process is, it still took over an hour to get it done. If you are like me, you heard a bunch of stuff in the flow of the speech that you would like to refer back to; this transcript should help.

You can get the file here, save it to your desktop, and then connect the Kindle to your computer with the USB cord. Just drag the Inaugural Address file into the “documents” file that will appear in the window opened for the Kindle. Pull the USB cord, check the Menu, and you are good to go! 

The little saga that results in this post began early Saturday morning when the Whispernet on my Kindle silently delivered my Wall Street Journal to the door. I especially love reading the Weekend Journal, with its eclectic collection of articles on topics ranging from shashimi to secret agents. Plus, where else can I find recommendations for decent wine that’s less than $10 a bottle?

This Saturday, there was also an article about G. K. Chesterton entitled “A Century of Thursdays.” The author, Allen Barra, celebrates the enduring influence of a writer who was, at best, for many of us, a section of reading in a college Brit Lit textbook, and a small section at that.

Barra certainly caught my attention when he noted that Chesterton was “quoted freely” during the campaign by Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, and that President-elect Obama’s followers “claim to see the influence of Chesterton’s thought on [his] worldview.”

But I really sat up when Barra describes the work that is arguably Chesterton’s most well-known, the novella The Man Who Was Thursday:

Set in a surrealistic London of shadowy, labyrinthine streets, the plot is populated by poets posing as undercover policemen and policemen pretending to be anarchists. This may sound slapstick, but “The Man Who Was Thursday” presages the dark clouds gathering over Europe before World War I.

An air of impending dread pervades the novel; the term “anarchist,” after all, stirred the fear 100 years ago that “terrorist” does today.

Sounds interesting. So I got to wondering if this classic is available on the Kindle–I mean, that’s where I discovered it. And indeed it is, put in the Kindle store by publishers of the print edition and others. If you browse for it, you will find a price point that you’ll like.

As you can tell from the Downloads page, though, I have taken an interest in getting texts formatted well for the Kindle, and so I have attempted a version of Chesterton’s classic. It is done in Mobipocket format, which doesn’t seem to offer all the bells and whistles of an AZW file, but what the heck? This one is free…;-)