EduKindle

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 on the planet, Wikipedia.

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!)

Wandering through my local Barnes and Noble over the weekend I ran into something unusual. A Nook. For months I have been drawn to the banners and brochures near the help desk, only to learn that the helpers didn’t know when the store might have an actual Nook on display. This was a pleasant surprise.

I think that we have to view the Nook differently than we view all the other devices that are beginning to flood onto the market. First, and most importantly, the Nook is connected to an existing distribution franchise, much as the Kindle was when it hit the market in late 2007. As we learned then, connection to a bookseller with existing distribution makes all the difference to an ereader device. Otherwise, why wasn’t consumer electronics giant Sony more successful in the years before the Kindle, especially given the size of its head start in the market? First mover should have counted for something, right? Clearly now, with 20/20 hindsight, we recognize that the Kindle ushered the ebook market out of the backwaters where it had been languishing on Sony’s watch, precisely because it nestled its new reading device in the nest of one of the biggest book distribution systems on the planet. Now, Barnes and Noble, is following that lead, and stands to succeed in some measure because of it.

Second, the book distribution system in which the company is nestling its Nook is one that the public is very familiar with and comfortable with. Who else holds mind share, even awareness, for bricks-and-mortar book distribution? Borders, maybe. Books-a-Million, not so much. B. Dalton? These examples prove the point: Barnes has a head start in an arena that Amazon cannot touch, the world of real-world bookstores. You just can’t hang out in an overstuffed chair, sipping your latte, and browse through books, at Amazon.

It is an interesting side note, I think, that Barnes also recognized the importance of something that is in the DNA of any book retailer: color matters. The color touch screen at the bottom of the Nook reflects this awareness. It is more than just a way to one-up the Kindle’s feature set; the ability to display cover art, so important to the look and feel of a Barnes and Noble store–the impact of those piles of brightly-colored books on tables and racks that greet you when you walk in the store–that element of the book browsing and buying experience is incorporated into the Nook.

(During my few minutes with the Nook, that color screen was kept on a pretty tight leash by the power management software in the device and kept going dark at what seemed to be very short intervals. It wasn’t hard to wake up, but because that screen is used in lieu of physical controls, its disappearance takes all your navigation options with it, and that I found a bit unnerving.)

How will this hit the sensibilities of people in schools? Well, kids like and expect color, so that’s a plus. If Barnes is successful in getting sample devices into all its stores, I think that teachers and kids will appreciate being able to get one into their hands to see what it is like before purchasing. (Remember Amazon’s workaround for its inability to provide this kind of real world preview? It enlisted its customers to meet up with prospective customers with its “see a Kindle near you” program. Wonder how effective that was?)

Ultimately, it should (emphasis on “should”) be hard for Barnes to squander the leverage of its brand and its physical locations in competing with Amazon. It is off to a weak start by failing to learn from Amazon’s early supply problems with the Kindle. By rushing to take advantage of the recent holiday buying season, Barnes let everyone know that its Nook operation is still rough around the edges–for sure. But given the fact that they have produced a nice, tight little reading device, and that they still own a bunch of comfy chairs and latte machines to go with it, they will find a number of customers for the Nook that Amazon has yet to reach.

You might have heard the story. In the midst of the big “kerfluffle” over Amazon’s pulling back of the illegally distributed copies of 1984, student Justin Gawronski awoke one day to discover that all the notes he had taken on the book as he read it on his Kindle were rendered useless. Not gone, just useless, despite the news reporting that he had “lost all his notes and annotations” from sources like the New York Times.  But we Kindle folk know that’s not entirely accurate.

Education Week gets it right when it reports that “his notes remain saved on the Kindle, [but] he says they’re useless now that the text is missing.” Correct! Amazon didn’t “steal” his notes; they just removed the text to which those notes are linked. It is a novel but predictable version of the problem that all academe will have with ebooks in the very near future: how can you identify a spot in the text so that others can find it? Jason has his notes, but the connection to the text is gone. (Everyone interested in other versions of this issue, such as how we will be making scholarly citations to ebook passages in our work, should read the comments to my post Page Number vs Position on the Kindle.)

In my comment on the EdWeek article, I noted:

In fact, the file that contains his notes can be deciphered, but he would need to go back through the text and find the spots that match up with the notes. He is in better shape than if he had lost the physical book (notes and text gone), and would have suffered little harm if these locations in the book were easily found in another copy.

And then I made a suggestion:

For Jason, a little bit of elbow grease should allow him to reconstruct the assignment. I’d even vote that he be given an extension, and Jeff Bezos would probably agree.

That’s right, an extension. And then maybe some of the folks who care so passionately about the Kindle and its prospects to revolutionize reading could assist Jason in getting those quotes back on track with the text. With all the advantages of digital text at our disposal, couldn’t we crowdsource this thing, grab his “notes and marks” and figure out where they actually belong, and let Jason get about the business of turning them into a top notch assignment?

C’mon, Kindle Nation, this could be our finest hour! And I am serious about the extension.

Pierre Gorissen has produced a nifty video on how to use the Kindlepedia tool from EduKindle to create reference articles for you Kindle or any other ereader that supports the Mobipocket format.

In addition, Pierre has written a little script that allows you to make a bookmarklet in your browser (works fine in my Firefox) that will automatically send any page you are on at Wikipedia to the Kindlepedia engine and return the article for download, perfectly formatted with a linked table of contents and live links throughout. He demonstrates how to set this up in the video.

I am posting the video here, and you can see more of Pierre’s handiwork at the EduKindle Community site.

Right after I posted Calendar for Kindle as a free download a few weeks ago, I got a bunch of feedback about how folks would really like it to work. Calendar was intended as a quick reference, but many of you are like me and find it helpful to be able to keep notes and reminders on the Kindle using the keypad (one of the BIG advantages that the Kindle has over other ereaders). In fact, I have found myself using Notepad more and more, sitting at Starbucks or at my daughter’s indoor lacrosse practice, not fumbling for a pen and the back of a store receipt to take a note on. I really like being able to view all my notes at once by selecting “My Notes and Marks” while I have Notepad open.

So, long story short, based on your feedback, I created Planner 2009 for Kindle and you can get it on the Downloads page (see tab above). Here you can keep your date reminders in an orderly way, but still navigate around the year pretty quickly with the linked months on the start page and the “back button.” (I was glad to hear Leslie Nicoll mention this underused navigation resource her Kindle Chronicles interview a week or so ago!) I also included a “Year at a Glance” page and some instructions for use.

Go ahead and grab the Planner for free and let me know what you think!

If you really want to get around the content on your Kindle, the “Back” button is key. It isn’t talked about a lot, but there is a big difference between going “back” and going to the “previous page.” Kindle Tips and Troubleshooting at Amazon tells us this much:

Back vs. Prev Page: When you are reading books, periodicals and personal documents, the Next Page and Prev Page buttons take you forward and backward within the content. The Back button is like the back button on your web browser and allows you to retrace your steps on Kindle. For example, you can follow a link in a book and then use the Back button to return to your place. Or, you can start in the Front Page section of a newspaper, follow a link to an article, read that article and hit the Back button to go back to the Front Page.

I think about the way I experience the “back” button a bit differently. It seems to be to be the most useful to think of pressing the back button as “undoing” your last click of the scroll wheel. The button takes you back to your last selection using the scroll wheel, not the page flippers.

And maybe the most important thing to understand about the back button, bar none, is that, unlike your web browser, there is no “forward” button on the Kindle. It doesn’t exist. So once you hit the back button, you have to re-navigate yourself all the way back to where you were in your content–the newspaper, for example, or the book, or whatever. Sometimes, this is darned inconvenient.

So, you can make the Kindle sing with the flippers, the menu key, and the back button, but if that right thumb twitches at the wrong moment, all you can do is curse under your breath and start over again in finding that spot in the book that you just left.

This navigation tip for the Kindle comes under the heading of “things you can do for yourself” to make navigation easier. That means setting bookmarks for things that you know you will want to find as you read.

You can set a bookmark anywhere in a book by turning down the little page corner at the top by clicking on it with the scroll wheel. Some people consider this the “cutest” feature of the Kindle, bar none. And, in truth, it is pretty cute. But it is also functional, and for this reason.

Reading with a Kindle is like riding in a car with airbags: you know you have an extra measure of safety beyond the average. This means that with the Kindle, you don’t have to worry about marking every little thing you might want to find later because you always have the “search” function. That is a safety net that no dead-tree print book will ever afford you. Remember concordances?

But it is very easy to scroll up and turn down that page corner, and then, using the techniques outlined in Navigation Tip #1, to use the flippers to move between bookmarks. (Remember, the bookmarks are the little “filled-in triangle pointers” and your current location is the “empty triangle pointer.”

By setting bookmarks agressively (remember, this is a “do for yourself” technique) you can make navigation through a big text a LOT easier for yourself.

OK, so now you know how to use the Enhanced Progress Bar to jet around the book you are reading. If it is a big text, then this is an immense help. Otherwise, you are left clicking “next page” like the flipper button on a pinball machine.

Once you are in the vicinity of where you want to be in the text, you can hold down the “Alt” key and press “next page” or “previous page” to jump ahead (or back) more than one page at a time–5% ahead (or back) to be precise. How’s your math? You don’t even want to try to calculate how many pages (er, positions) that is, because to do so you would have to know how many pages positions this particular book has. For more of this nonsense, see this post.

(Secret EduKindle Tip: I do better on this kind of rapid scanning if I just reduce the font size to #1 and use the flippers to cover a lot of ground with each flip. With the smaller font, I am still covering ground quickly, but I am not skipping over anything–like a chapter heading, for example–which can happen when I use the Alt+flipper strategy. I also try to avoid pressing the flipper too quickly, as that seems to skip pages as well.)

Stay tuned for some more navigation tips that are a bit more precise than these “flipper” strategies.

One of the little known ways to get around the Kindle, especially if you are reading a large document, is to use the Enhanced Progress Bar. (Neat, huh?) So, how to do this?

1. Roll the scroll wheel over the Progress Bar (that line of dots across the bottom of the screen) and click. The rest of the screen grays out (after a Kindle-like pause–hang on, be patient, it will happen) and a box appears at the top with instructions on how to navigate bookmarks).

2. You will see something like this (without the labels, of course), known as the “Enhanced Progress Bar”:

You current location in the book is indicated by the “hollow” pointer, and any bookmarks that you have set are indicated by the “filled” or black markers.

3. What we are interested in right now are the number buttons that appear as images below the dots. These correspond to the number keys on the Kindle keyboard, and allow you to navigate through the book by pressing those number keys. Each key represents ten percent of the text, so if you push the “5″ key, you should jump halfway through the book.

Since the Kindle does not offer a “Go to End” on the menu bar (as it does a “Go to Beginning” option), using the Enhanced Progress Bar to jump to the end by hitting the “0″ key is quite handy, especially if you are looking for the index or endnotes.

4. Once you have pushed the number key of your choice to jump to a different spot in the book, you will see the text change but stayed “grayed out.” To start reading again, just roll the scroll wheel off the Progress Bar and, voila!, the text returns to reading mode.

5. To return to your earlier “current” position, just hit the “Back” button on the lower east side of the Kindle.

Stay tuned for more tips in this series on Kindle Navigation.

The PDF conversion is better than advertised in my experience. I converted a 400+ page PDF and it reads beautifully on the Kindle. The limitations are that 1) the converted document does not offer a Table of Contents that the Kindle recognizes and that 2) the navigation aids in the original document, like section indicators, are missing. The converted document is easy to read but difficult to move around in. I set some bookmarks as I scanned through the text to make it easier to find my place.