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 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.

Should I get a bunch of Kindles for my school? It’s a question the answer to which is up in the air. A bunch of iPads? Still in doubt. Here’s the real question: should I be taking advantage of the properties of digital text in my teaching? The answer to that one is unequivocal, and the answer is yes.

OK, you say, digital text has been around for a long time. What’s the big deal right now? The answer to that one is easy, too: the emergence of dedicated mobile reading platforms, like the Kindle and the iPad (and the iPhone, and the Sony Reader, and the Nook). Digital text has been available for a long time in one form, primarily, and that is formatted as HTML and viewed on a computer monitor. (In fact, it is indicative of this history that 50% of ebooks today are read on a computer, even with the proliferation of choices in mobile readers.)

So what’s different now? For the first time we have devices and software that are dedicated to taking advantage of the virtues of digital text. My quick list of those virtues includes:

• variable text size
• variable type face
• distribution of text electronically
• availability of free text
• storage requirements for digital text
• amount of the world’s knowledge already captured in digital text
• user control of digital text
• the sustainability of digital text
• fresh formats for prose enabled by digital text

In this and the next few posts, I am going to discuss  these virtues and link them to what we know about how students learn. First up, variable text size.

Digital Text: The Advantage of Variable Font Size for Reading

Something that has been widely reported is the pleasure that a lot of people take in reading text on the Kindle at a larger font size than is typical for them. That is certainly true for me; I am a declared lover of Kindle Font Size #4 which, as it turns out, is roughly equivalent to a 14 point font. In an unscientific survey I conducted on this blog a while back, 70% of the participants indicated a preference for Kindle Font Size #3 or higher. While this was a very small sample, the preference for larger font sizes was clear.

In the meantime, students have put their thoughts on the record about font size, and bigger is certainly preferred by the middle school students polled by Kathy Parker at Seneca (IL) Middle School, where Kathy has run a Kindle pilot program this past school year. They like the largest font size, period. They say it helps them read better.

Recently, a blogger in the UK noted that reading text on his iPhone was easier than in books or other settings. Why? A bit of investigation told him that larger fonts reduce the amount of print on the page; words are less jammed together. The blogger, it turns out, is dyslexic, and receives this diagnosis of the situation validated by a prominent neuroscientist, who comments that “Many dyslexics have problems with ‘crowding’, where they’re distracted by the words surrounding the word they’re trying to read.”

I did a little research myself on the “crowding” phenomenon, which has been carefully studied by researchers here and abroad, especially as it affects the reading rate of “normal” and “dyslexic” readers. The findings across many studies are clear:

• all readers benefit from increasing text size up to a maximum, after which increased reading rate associated with the larger text flattens out
• the optimal font size for “normal” readers is larger than average, but not as large as it is for dyslexic readers
• much of the reading rate difference between normal and dyslexic readers can be mitigated through increased font size

In a Research Brief I wrote recently on the subject, I provide an overview of “crowding”: “In the research, crowding specifically refers to “the difficulty in identifying a letter embedded in other letters” (Chung, 2007). Studies have shown that the crowding effect impacts reading rates in both the horizontal and vertical proximity of text, so that larger font size creates more space between adjacent letters in the text, and may increase line spacing as well, reducing crowding.”

I have also summarized the findings of a number of studies. For example, a 2009 study conducted at the University of Rome, Italy, tells us that for both the control and experimental groups, “…the reading rate increased with print size up to a maximum. In dyslexics, the fastest rate was obtained at a significantly larger character size than in controls” (Martelli, DiFilippo, Spinelli, and Zoccolotti, 2009).

You can read or download a copy of the study in PDF format right here.

And if the research doesn’t persuade you, maybe the words of the middle schoolers who have reported on their Kindle-enabled reading will:  “The font that everyone prefers to use with the Kindle 2 is the largest font size.”

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!

Ereader software for computers is one area in which Amazon has NOT led the way; many, many companies have created ereader software for devices from the Palm Pilot to the netbook. These providers have contributed to the current plethora of formats for ebooks, and each has tried, in its own way, to lock readers in to a particular format, all the better to lock in business with them. This is a game that Amazon knows well and has played aggressively with its closed system and its proprietary format.

Adding a desktop app that integrates with your Kindle library and, of course, the Kindle Store, can be construed as just another tactic in the battle for business. But for educators, “this time we win!” (to quote Brad Pitt’s line from The Mexican). Why? Well, let’s start with the fact that, while there aren’t a whole lot of Kindles in schools these days, there sure are a heck of a lot of computers! Now, any student who goes to the library to study or who fires up the computer at home can view content in the format exclusive to the Kindle. With the popularity of the Kindle and the “cool factor” that it brings, this may be the way that schools and educators begin to think about making academic reading content available across their networks. Kids “get” the idea of a Kindle, and now that idea is readily available at every school in the country.

Could kids have been reading ebooks at school before Kindle for PC (KFPC)? Sure they could have, but in fact they weren’t. Now there is a model in place for a “anywhere, anytime reading” that includes the PC on the desk over there and the ereader device in my bag (and the iPhone in my pocket). Could this arrangement have been cobbled together before KFPC? Sure it could, but it wasn’t very convenient. Now it is. A win for the consumer mentality applied to the schoolhouse.

David Rothman at TeleRead has a nice review of KFPC from an ebook reader’s perspective that I don’t need to repeat here. The software is very basic, with a plain interface, and very few tweakable options that allow you to customize the interface. No two-page reading pane, that sort of thing. Can’t make notes while reading (a limitation for educational uses that amazon is working on correcting). But teachers like simple, teachers like things that don’t crash. So, for me, I think this app is a solid step forward for doing business with Amazon in an academic context.

And what is even better, maybe, for folks like Kathy Parker and her Kindle Crew out there in Seneca IL, is that a PC station qualifies as one of the six devices onto which most Kindle books can be downloaded and viewed. The minute I loaded the app and connected with the mother ship, a new mobile device popped up in my list of such devices on the “Manage Your Kindle” page: “William’s Kindle for PC”, right there next to “Will’s iPhone.”

Educators should not be confused by others’ confusion over whether KFPC will display books not obtained form the Amazon Kindle Store. It absolutely will. In fact, once you open a “free” book that you got from Project Gutenberg in the Mobipocket format that the Kindle prefers, it will appear in your onboard KFPC library unless you remove it. In fact, all the books on your computer that are formatted a Mobipocket files will take on the KFPC icon image shown here. If you look quickly, you can watch the transformation take place. This makes it easy to check a file, a position number, a Table of Contents–whatever–on your PC before you view it on your Kindle. Handy.

For example, I created an article from Wikipedia using the Kindlepedia tool about the Berlin Wall. You can download it here. Once it is on your desktop, the icon will look like the book above, and it will go into your onboard library (NOT the library at the mother ship) and open up for reading. Note that this version of the article appears in full color and nice, sharp resolution on the screen. And if you don’t finish reading it in KFPC, just pop the file onto your Kindle and read up on this topic later. Really handy.

So its a big thumbs up for Kindle for PC from an educator’s standpoint. I will look forward to comment from other Kindle-curious educators about KFPC and the ways it makes ebook reading a reality in schools.

Kindle for Mac, anyone? (Amazon says it is on the way.)

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.

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.

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.

Of course, laptops themselves are getting smaller. The Asus Eee and the new wave of inexpensive netbooks challenge ereaders and iPod variants for a spot at the low end of the cost continuum and for space in the user’s backpack. Netbooks are now being offered by wireless providers like Verizon for less than $200, the cost of an iPhone, and well below the cost of any current e-ink ereader. With full operating systems and full internet connectivity, aren’t these devices the best choice for students who require word processing, email, and other services for school?

The answer is yes…and no. Let me tell you why.

However you cut it, the real utility of a learning appliance has to do with two things: its adaptability to academic tasks and its portability. Why does portability matter? If a learning appliance can’t be used at school and at home and at every place in between, it only supports part of the learning process (that part which requires a computer) and none of the others (the parts that require other things, like books, pencils, erasers). The primary obstacle to portability for a laptop computer is its relatively high power requirement. You may get a few hours from your laptop battery but, absent an outlet, the laptop as learning appliance goes dead at some point.

The laptop also gets a knock against it because it is not really adaptable to a primary academic task: reading. It seems like no surprise that as students’ time spent on a computer has risen, their reading skills (and scores) have dropped. [see ACT report, as well as To Read and others] The kind of access to information that students have through computer networks requires a bunch of skills that seem appropriate to living in the midst of an information explosion, but one skill that is not brought into play in this environment is what has been termed “long form” reading, meaning the kind of reading that one does when absorbed in a novel. “Short form” reading, yes, but not its more venerable counterpart.

Why is long form largely excluded when a laptop is the primary learning appliance? Screen fatigue. The backlit laptop screen produces eye fatigue and other kinds of reading ennui that I can’t quite define. Maybe it’s like stting in a motionless Ferrari listening to the radio. It is hard to fully engage with the experience without firing up that beautiful machine and taking off. Maybe it’s also the shape of the thing (the laptop, not the Ferrari), not easy to hold in one hand or cradle on your stomach in the hammock. In any case, it is hard to find anyone willing to make a strong case for “long form” reading on a backlit laptop computer screen.

So where does that leave us? Laptops do more than ereaders, but the power drain is high and a primary academic function, reading, is not adequately supported. Ereaders do less than laptops (or iPhones), but their power requirements are strikingly lower and they do promote long form reading. But how much less than a laptop does an ereader like the Kindle do? (Note that as of this writing, only the Kindle can be used for this comparison. In 12-18 months, however, a whole new generation of ereaders with larger screens and wifi options will make this argument valid for the bulk of available ereaders.) The Kindle does have basic internet access, so live links to internet resources can be utilized, but only in a slow and monochromatic way. The Kindle is no match for the laptop as regards onboard software that supports, well, almost any purpose. You could do the reading for your English or history class on a Kindle, but you couldn’t write your paper on it. Nor could you email it to your teacher, or upload it to a proofreading site, or copy and paste a quote from Churchill into it–none of these. Once you had read the book, you would still have to find a word processor and a printer or email connection to complete and submit your assignment.

But, when you think about it, you have to leave your laptop right now and use another appliance (better known as the book itself) in order to complete the same academic task. So maybe this isn’t an either/or between laptops and ereaders after all. Maybe it is the case that all or most academic tasks require (and will continue to require) more than a single appliance. That it probably the long and short of it.

But if you only had one, which would it be?

My modest proposal at this point is…the Kindle. Why? Because the Kindle supports the ongoing, critical academic function known as long form reading. It supports easy and rapid distribution of content (like the laptop), and it does allow limited access and interactivity with the resources of the internet. It works for days rather than hours in the absence of an electrical outlet. It is small and light. It is designed for onboard dictionaries and lookup functions that support the needs of the reader. It readily supports resizing of text.

It does all these things, but make no mistake, the key to my choice of the Kindle is its support for long form reading.

This historical character, played by Joss Stone on Showtime’s The Tudors, is one of the most enigmatic of Henry’s wives. She acts as a kind of historical pivot on which Protestantism, international politics, the changing character of Henry VIII, and the ineffabilities of male-female attraction swivel on the television show and in the history books.

Despite a brief appearance, Tudors creator Michael Hirst gives her a couple of classic lines. One captures the dilemma faced by every girl who came Henry’s way: “If I fail to please the King, will he kill me?” And then, with regards to the marital bed, she cites Henry’s relentlessly unhealing leg wound as a bit of a downer in the foreplay department: “It stinks, no?” ‘Nuff said.

So, if you are interested in this woman who went from the King’s wife to the “King’s beloved Sister,” and would like to read about her on your Kindle, head on over to the Tudors download page and drag the article to the documents folder on your Kindle.

And that’s it for another season of the Tudors. Given the speed with which they dispatched Cromwell last night, it looks like one more season will do it!