EduKindle

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.

As you can tell, I have been expanding my consciousness of the ereader world beyond the Kindle. I have a Sony Pocket Edition, an Aztak Pocket Pro, a Cybook Gen-3, and am sorely tempted to purchase a Nook, should one ever become available. But I was Kindle born and raised as an ebook reader, and I still think (along with others) that the Kindle 2 still represents the best value out there.

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.

I recently purchased a Sony Pocket Edition Reader to see how the rest of the ereader world looks compared to my Kindle. The view from here is surprisingly good. The Pocket Edition is small, tight, handsome, and, it actually does some thing that my Kindle can’t do. Like check a book out from the library.

If you, like me, entered the ereader world through the Kindle, the idea of impulse buying has been deeply ingrained by the slick Amazon consumer model, based on instantaneous access to the most popular titles. With the discount price of no more than $9.99 per book, this system encourages the kind of anytime, anywhere buying that Amazon pioneered when it opened its online bookstore in July 1994. I personally succumbed to the Amazon system in the late 90s, and I have been a fan and customer ever since. When I saw the Kindle, I had to try it and to this day use my Kindle 1 more than any other device, including the print book, to read with.

But last night my daughter looked at my sony Pocket Edition sitting on the table and asked “Dad, is that your new favorite ereader?’ Stricken by a pang of guilt for having been caught loving an ereader more than my Kindle, I mumbled something to the effect of “Oh, for right now I am using it more.” But the truth is , maybe I do have something going on on the side with my Sony.

Aside from the sleek simplicity of the Pocket Edition, and its VERY CONVENIENT size, my current infatuation with the device has to do with its ability to do something my Kindle can’t do: borrow a book.  My public library in Southern Maryland is part of a state-wide consortium that offers ebooks and e-audiobooks for download if you have a library card from a participating library. The process is simple. I navigate to the portal through my local library’s website, log in using my library card, and search or browse the catalog. What I am looking for are books I want to read that are formatted in the EPUB format that my Sony Pocket Edition likes. When I find what I am looking for, I check the book out for 14 days using the eBook Library software that came with my Pocket Edition. The interface is like the iTunes interface, except more primitive and a little buggy at times, but very workable. Voila! I am reading a book for a couple of weeks and my credit card bill is $9.99 lighter. Does anybody think that this isn’t how it will work in the future?

What are the downsides of this arrangement? Well, my local library has all of 71 titles available in the EPUB format. The eBook Libaray software does inexplicably “do nothing” at times when I ask it to do something on my Windows XP machine, though that has only happened once and it was resolved by closing the program and reopening it. The Pocket Edition has to be cabled to my computer to make any of this happen–zero direct internet connectivity. No keyboard for notetaking on the Pocket Edition, and the bookmarks I place are only useful as long as I have the book.

But for getting a popular title for free for two weeks, having it display in different font sizes clearly and reflow properly on what I would call a state of the art e-ink screen, on a piece of consumer electronics that feels solid and fun to use and that can truly fit easily in my pocket, the Sony Pocket Edition does things that I can’t do with my Kindle.

I’ve had my Sony Pocket Edition for a couple or weeks now and I have to say that I like it. It is a handsome unit, very tight and solid. It fits in the palm of your hand and, yes, in the pocket of your pants.

I was drawn to this ereader because of the size. My Kindle DX spends most of its time on and end table in my living room because of its size–the DX is just not that convenient to carry. The DX needs to go inside my bag next to the folders and legal pads (where it fits very nicely), but it’s not the reader I grab in the car waiting at the drive-thru or at the dentist’s office. (Right now, I grab my Kindle 1.) But the Sony Pocket Edition is a great candidate for the quick, easy, have-a-minute read that these devices make possible. In this regard, size matters.

Now, I have read chapters of books on my iPhone using the Kindle app, and that is good in a pinch as well. But the thing that hooked me on ereaders in the first place is the e-ink screen. In this regard, I just don’t get Nicholson Baker and the others who find e-ink screens to be a muddy mess. The Kindle and the Sony both produce a crisp e-ink display that I find pleasurable to read, and the Sony not a bit less than the Kindle.

From a Kindler’s perspective, the greatest limitation of the Sony Pocket Edition is the absence of wireless connectivity to a source, any source, of reading material. This is the Kindle’s gift to the world, and soon to be matched by other devices.

But what I found is that the Sony interface through their “eBook Library” software provides an experience very similar to the one that I have happily participated in with my iPod Mini and iTunes. The Sony software, once installed on your computer, looks like a primitive version of iTunes. There is the list of folders and devices on the left, the list of items in the selected folder or device on the right. Plug in the Pocket Edition and it is recognized, just like my iPod with the iTunes software. The Sony software certainly doesn’t offer all the bells and whistles that iTunes does, but it gets the job done. It allows you to access content and transfer it, create collections, and otherwise manage your reading, both on and off the device.

Now the BIG up for Sony is its integration with Google Books, where a treasure trove of Epub-formatted public domain texts await. And the Library+Sony Bookstore make it VERY easy grab and load those books.  More on that wondrous process in the next installment of my look at the Sony Pocket Edition.

I know that we are all about the Kindle here at EduKindle, but as others in this space step up their games to compete with Amazon, I plan to look at all comers and compare what they offer to the Kindle value proposition. The real emphasis here is on the “edu” part of EduKindle, so if another reader offers something that the Kindle can’t or won’t offer, we need to look at it from the perspective of how it might help kids and teachers.

With larger readers all the craze these days, led by the Kindle DX and by the promised arrival of the Plastic Logic reader in the new year, I was quite surprised to find myself drawn to this smaller “pocket” reader. Maybe that comes from finding the iPhone to be a better ereader than I expected it to be, or maybe it grows out of the fact that I still love my Kindle 1 for its portability. The DX is just a tad too big for my everyday reading, with the exception of my morning perusal of the New York Times.

So I saw this little unit and decided to give it a try. A fuller review from an educator’s perspective to follow!