Kindle for Distance Learning

I read John Gapper's column in the Financial Times with great interest. He described the battle between the Sony Reader and Amazon's Kindle and indicated that he thought that the Kindle had won. The Kindle has built-in wireless capability, it is easy to get content from Amazon for it (now there are over 145,000 items available), you can easily subscribe to newspapers and blogs and of course, it has a keyboard. Although Amazon has not provided sales figures for the Kindle, other groups have estimated that about 240,000 units have been sold.

One of the reasons that I am so fascinated by e-readers and the Kindle, in particular, is that I getting my Master's in Library Science through an online program and I can see what a terrific market the online learning community is for a Kindle or other reader. Of course, now the Kindle can only access what is available through Amazon or books in the public domain and that would have to be expanded.

For my classes,I access a bulletin board in which the professor and the students post and respond. Through this bulletin board, also access my assignments, find papers to be read and access other course tools such as our wiki. A Kindle or Kindle-like device would allow distance students to easily keep in touch with the bulletin board, get their email and research. The wireless capability is the key along with the keyboard because students could use the device not just to read items on the bulletin board but post as well.

A lot of distance students complain about the lack of community and face-to-face interactions. That bothers me less because I managed a development group remotely for several years. What I would like to see to increase satisfaction in distance learning is improved access and a portable device that I can always carry and like the Kindle, is always connected to a wireless network.

Today in the New York Times

There are two interesting articles in the business section of the New York Times today. The first describes a new e-reader device that is is being tested in France to view French newspapers over the device. The article Reading Device Enlisted to Help French Papers describes a e-reader which has a menu of several newspapers and with one click one can select the newspaper they want to read.

Interesting points in this article include the fact that the device and trial are sponsored by France Telecom and the content will include advertisements as a way of increasing revenue. The article points out that it is difficult to effectively track the viewership of on-line ads through such a device. The article also mentions that the e-reader will eventually be able to access other content such as books although it does not mention any active partnerships.

The device seems to lack a keyboard and one tester mentioned that they would really like to be able to cut and paste articles but that did not seem possible at this point with the device. They are not disclosing the cost yet and the article seem to indicate that France Telecom was considering selling the device for a lower price if the customer bought a contract. Elsewhere in the article, it was suggested that the price may be about $800 which would make it more expensive than other readers such as the Kindle.

Another thing that struck me about the article, although not related to e-readers was the percentage of newspaper readers in various countries. In the US and France, that percentage was in the 40's (48% in the US and 43% in France) but the readership in Germany of newspapers is 73%. One must ask why are they so much more popular in Germany.

Overall, very interesting that this is being developed and marketed by a telecommunications provider rinstead of a content provider such as Amazon with the Kindle.

The other interesting article was a column by David Carr, Hey Friend, Do I Know You? about the increasing use of Facebook for professional users. Carr describes "meeting" and "friending" other reporters online and using Facebook to develop his online network. Sounds like Facebook is moving on from merely being a social, social networking tool, to a business social networking tool.

A new e-reader

There was a story in the New York Times earlier this week on a new e-reader called the Readius. It is small and can fit into a pocket but the screen folds out which makes it easy to carry and yet provides about 22 linkes of text. It has wireless capability but does not seem to have a keyboard which I would like because I often take notes when I read. I would really like to be able to bookmark sections and annotate while I read. I have never liked writing in books and now that most of my books come from the library that is not possible anyway. I often take notes in a small paper notebook when I am reading but I have found that if I finish the book and pick up the notebook to see what I found interesting about the book, my notes are hard to follow because it lacks the context of the book.

An e-reader that has a keyboard would allow me to take notes and I like the fact that many of the e-readers can hold several books at a time. Imagine going on vacation with one device and not having to tote 10 books along with you.

No one would have believed...

Lee Gomes in his column, Portals, in today's Wall Street Journal lists his top technology trends of 2007 and one is flash memory which allows people to download and view movies on their mobile phones. He mentions that this is something that young people in particular and doing and it echoes something that Chris Anderson observed in The Long Tail and that is that many young people are growing up listening to music on iPods, watching movies on iPods or phones and generally reading most of their content on computers. In other words, while they are still listening to music, reading and watching movies they are doing this on none of the same devices that many of us used when we were growing up. And, further, these are devices that no one would have believed would either be available or used in this way even 15 years ago.

I think that this change is an excellent example of the pitfalls of inside-out design which I have observed in many of the discussions with my classmates in library school. I mean inside-out design to refer to the approach to design which overweights how the individual feels about the product or service. Reactions to electronic books have been typical of this inside-out approach. Many people will say that they love books, love the feel of a physical book and therefore reading books on the computer or on an e-book will never catch on. But, of course, people do read on computers and will certainly embrace e-books if they have certain features such as the ability to search and annotate and eventually decouple the devices from proprietary formats. I must admit that I am looking forward to such a device because I currently carry around several books that I may be reading and notebooks to record my thoughts. The thought of carrying around one device is very appealing and given the positive reaction to the e-ink displays I imagine that it will appeal to other people as well. Of course, maybe this is just another example of inside-out design because it is what appeals to me.

We must be more open to the opportunities that new technology applications bring to our users and even if we do not yet see a role for a device or technology we must become familiar with it and think about how it can be used. Perhaps, we should spend some time interviewing or shadowing the youngest generation of library users and see how they do things.

The dramatic increase in storage capability has made the iPod, digital cameras, powerful laptops and phones that can act as music players and video devices. In 1983, I visited a computer graphics company that did some of the first computer animations. According to Wikipedia, they did 27 minutes of animation for The Last Starfighter and at the time this was considered to be an astonishing amount of animation and this was done on a Cray X-MP supercomputer. I had my photo taken in the midst of the Cray and it was in a single room, incredibly large and shaped like a horseshoe. No one would have believed then that computer animation could be so ubiquitous and that we would now have incredible computer power available from such small and portable devices as our current laptops.