So, the drift in Kindle design has been toward reducing features that make it easy to obtain books from other sources (remember the SD card slot from the Kindle 1?) and making it even easier to buy books from Amazon. (Don’t bother citing the studies that I am sure were conducted to say that this was done because this is what Amazon customers told the company they want.) The problem is that most schools want to do the book buying, and they usually discourage student activities which result in unapproved purchases that appear on the district’s monthly statement. In fact, the workaround in Pinellas County to allow students with Kindles (yes, all 2,000) of them to choose and purchase books for the dedicated ereader the school mandated they carry around with them every day is that the students and their families can “donate” books to the district by purchasing them for the Kindle, but cannot own them outright. Do you see where this is going?

Enter the new firmware upgrade for the Barnes and Noble Nook (released a few months ago–I imagine it has hit most Nooks in captivity by this time). One feature of the upgrade is to add a password option for the book purchasing problem. Now, you can password the device itself, as you can also do with the Kindle (generation 2 and 3), but on the Nook (and, apparently, NOT on the NOOKcolor), under Settings you will find the option to require a password for book purchases from the B&N Store.

How to do? Turn on the Nook and select Settings from the colorful menu across the bottom (hit the little “n” above the screen to awaken if dark). In the resulting menu, choose Device and then “Enable purchase password protection.”  You will then be asked to enter the password on the account to which the Nook is registered. Voila! No books can be purchased from the device without entering the password.

Now I would have preferred the ability to set any password to prevent unauthorized buying, but I guess it makes sense to require the account password to be used. That makes it uniform for all Nooks on that account, and it doesn’t create another password for you to try to manage. But it does argue for unguessable passwords. No more “cougars” and “titans” for the Nooksters among us!

So, this is just one little control, and I can’t reasonably make the argument that B&N listened to educators in any special way when they added it. But score another one for the last, best bookstore around! In the Amazon star chamber, no controls are going to be approved that would hobble (or insert a moment’s pause into) buying something. And maybe Barnes and Noble is making the kind of business mistake that folks like Amazon and Apple avoid at all costs. But, for once, a commonsense improvement that does nothing more than give users more control of their ereader device has been made available, and educators have yet another reason to look somewhere other than the Kindle when they expand their students’ access to books with digital text and mobile reading platforms.

Can’t find the expansion slot for additional memory on your Kindle 2?

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.

“Once you free up space,” the email told me, “the waiting items will be automatically delivered to your Kindle. You can also select “Check for New Items” on the Home screen menu to get new content.”

Kinda cool. Sure beats me wondering why my newspaper wasn’t delivered this morning…

When I got the notice, I took the 2G SD card out of Robin’s camera and put it in the Kindle, after powering down, of course. When I fired back up, the Wall Street Journal and a couple of other items popped right onto the SD card. Really, pretty smooth!

“Save page as clipping” only preserves text, so I had to try the “screenshot” (the equivalent of “printscreen” on your PC) option.  The first thing to remember is that the screenshot can only be saved on an SD card, so if you don’t have an SD card handy, you are out of luck.  I pulled mine out of the digital camera, powered down the Kindle (important step), inserted the card (a 2-gigger), and fired the Kindle back up.

The keyboard shortcut to capture a screenshot on the Kindle is alt+shift+g.  I hit the keys and then powered down the Kindle to remove the SD card.  My PC found the screenshot in the root of the card, and I copied it to my computer.  When I opened the .gif file in my picture viewer, it was bigger and easier to read that it was on the Kindle.

If you keep a card in the Kindle, a lot of these steps would be unnecessary.  Grabbing these charts and graphs for later review using the “screenshot” function works just great.

You can find more keyboard shortcuts at MobileReads wiki.