1.  Sharing (books among devices on one account)

2.  Lending and Borrowing (books among all users)

3.  Library Lending (books to patrons of the library)

Sharing E-books among Devices on One Account

When Amazon came out with the Kindle, the company realized that book-buyers would want to be able to load their purchases onto more than one reading device. So the company made it possible for customers to load their purchases onto as many as six devices, in most case, if the devices were registered to the same account. As schools began to implement ereader programs, educators saw the benefit of this policy: if a school purchases six or more Kindle, every book they buy can be distributed to six devices, effectively cutting the cost of an already lower-priced e-book by a factor of six. It is like buying six copies for the price of one. And with a little extra management, this “sharing” of books among devices registered to the same account has worked well. Here is how it works for the three major booksellers:

• Amazon Kindle: You can download up to six copies of each book to different platforms.
• Nook/Nook Color: You can download each book within devices on an account, limit six.
• iBooks: You can share among i-devices registered to the same iTunes account. (More info here…)

But…once you have shared the maximum number of times, the sharing stops (at least for Kindle and Nook). This means that once you have assigned the book to the allowed number of devices, those devices “own” those books and they cannot be pulled back into the archive and assigned to other devices. If they could, each book could be downloaded to different devices infinitely, which is clearly not what the publishers want.

Lending E-Books to Someone Not on the Same Account

When the Nook came out, the LendMe feature, which allows anyone to “lend” a book they own to another Nook owner, was unique, but now Amazon has finally matched the feature for Kindle.  Lending an e-book means allowing another reader with the same type of ereader to read a book in your library for two weeks.

But there are rather strict limits to this feature:

1. You can only lend a book once, period.
2. You can only lend for a two week period, period.
3. The book is unavailable to you for the two week lending period, period.
4. Not every e-book is lendable—publishers decide. Period.

Still, this means that an e-book you purchase behaves just a little bit more like a print copy of a book. Heck, half of the books we lend our friends never come back at all!  But consult the purchase details about each book you buy to see if it qualifies for lending. Surveys show that only about half of the e-books you can purchase qualify for lending/borrowing.

So how can I find a book to borrow?

A small cottage industry has sprung up in matching lenders with borrowers. Services to link the two over the Internet began when Barnes and Noble introduced the feature over a year ago, and has gained momentum now that Amazon has joined the party. Here are just a few:

• Kindle Lending Club
• LendInk
• eBookFling

You can read a brief description of each of these services (and more) by clicking here.

Library Lending of E-Books

Finally, there is regular old-fashioned library lending of e-books. Most e-book library lending is based on devices that support Adobe Digital Editions software, which manages the digital licenses that allow books to be distributed to different users for a specified lending period.

Any computer can install the free Adobe Digital Editions software and borrow books from a lending organization, like your local public library. Often, a service like Overdrive is used to manage the whole process, which supports placing a hold on books that are currently checked out. (E-book lending, like physical book lending, restricts the use of the book to one reader at a time.)

For schools, finding a reader that supports library lending and borrowing could vastly expand the number of books available to your students. Right now, among the popular readers, the following do support this feature:

• Nook and Nook Color
• Sony, all models
• iPad (if you install the Bluefire Reader)
• Others, including Android, may be included soon…

So, those are your choices. As I survey the landscape, it seems to me that these strategies offer differing value to educators, so I have ranked them here for your consideration:

• Lending and Borrowing (books among all users) – value to educators? 4 out of 10
• Sharing (books among devices on one account)– value to educators? 8 out of 10
• Library Lending (books to patrons of the library) – value to educators? 9 out of 10

This information is the subject of a 30-minute webinar, which you can view by clicking here.

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.

Your Conduct. You agree you will use the wireless connectivity provided by Amazon only in connection with Services Amazon provides for the Device. You may not use the wireless connectivity for any other purpose.

Not sure I follow. Amazon created a “Basic Web Browser” that can access the Internet from the Kindle. Clumsy, yes. Slow, most definitely. Wide open, seems to be… So, what could I do on the Internet with a browser and a keypad that violates these terms?

I am going to follow Jeff Bezos and his definition of the Kindle as a “frictionless experience,” one that facilitates rather than restricts more and more reading. Maybe I will download some Uncle Remus to the Kindle so I can more closely study the meaning of all this talk about a briar patch.

Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told LJ that a loan of a Kindle without content is OK, but sharing a device loaded with content “with a wide group of people would not be in line with the terms of use.”

Maybe with the use of works in the public domain from Mark Twain, Shakespeare, and James Fennimore Cooper, schools will remain immune to this “retail only” approach that Amazon is apparently taking. Is it possible to to unleash a revolution, with strings attached?