DIIA Blog

Many people thought that the iPhone and iPod Touch would not be good e-readers - too small many said. Well, I thought this too. But, I bit the bullet and downloaded both the free iPhone Kindle app and the free Barnes and Noble Reader bought some relatively inexpensive titles and found myself actually reading more than I have in a good while (books at least). Entire books. I find the screen actually perfectly adequate for reading, but the killer feature is that device is usually with me all the time, so I can read whenever the time or notion hits me. This convenience outweighs many of the drawbacks including screen size. I don’t want to drag an e-reader around with me all the time, but a smartphone is a necessity. My wife sometimes leaves hers at home and I always look at her with a look of incomprehension. “Are you SURE you don’t want to bring that with you?” I ask.

The same can be said for educational apps for the iPhone. Ahhh… what good will are they? Kids just use the thing for Wikipedia, social networking and IM’ing… all distractions and inaccurate. And who needs another rote memorization app that many of the iPhone “education” apps offer? Well, it appears that one company has thought a little deeper about what an educational app should be and have released an app for essay writing. Yes, essay writing. On an iPhone no less. How or why would one want to do this you might ask? Well, it turns out that plenty of college age kids think its a pretty good idea. The application is called the Essay Writing Wizard (I know, sort of a mouthful). What this app does that no other one does right now is help students to THINK about how to put together their thoughts into a carefully constructed essay. The app offers a number of features and tips for writing good essays and then guides the student through the process without dumbing things down or hand holding. Its really a tool for collecting ideas and the formalizing these into an essay. Similar in spirit to the e-readers on the iPhone, but for writing, EWW allows one to capture ideas and notes on the go, wherever they are. This little feature turns out to be quite powerful as we all have discovered with our iPhones and 100,000 plus available apps. So finally, in this large mix of iPhone Apps, a tool emerges that can truly help college kids get going on one tried and true part of academic life in higher education, the essay, and do it write away.

For an in depth review of this app, check out the Edu-In-Review review. It is comprehensive gives you the details on the app which is $3.99. You can buy add ons for particular writing areas as well which prices varying.   

The App is made by Niles Technology Group which you can read more about here.

Keene Haywood

As the social networking scene continues to explode, developers are increasingly finding novel ways to use services such as Facebook and Twitter. Through the Facebook Connect technology, the developers of a web app called Aardvark seem to be onto something. Their service basically crowd sources your contacts and contacts of contacts in Facebook to help answer any question you may have. Any question. So how good would this be for students? Probably pretty good unless you are taking a test, in which case asking the Vark might not be a good idea.

For getting answers to questions stumping you, you can submit your question to Aardvark which is then interpreted by the system’s artificial intelligence system. It then sends the message out to people in your extended social network who might be able to answer your question. The question is sent out anonymously and the replies back are as well (as far as I can tell), so no question is too ridiculous. Your identity should not be revealed. A average response time is about 5 minutes. And of course an iPhone app was just released. This is an intriguing application that will be interesting to see how it matures, especially in higher education circles.

Keene

Well, maybe not studious in the true sense of the word, but the ReadWriteWeb has a nice collection of applications that can help you with a little studying, buying textbooks, RENT-ing textbooks, keeping organized, designing a dorm room (I know how much design can one do in 100 sq. ft) and more. Its a nice little overview and worth a look over if you are a student about to start classes again, know a student who is heading back to school or you just pine for your former student days and want to use all the apps the cool kids are using this year. Of particular note is StudyBlue, a web app that utilizes Facebook Connect to hook into your Facebook account for collaboration studying (a good term to throw out to the parents).

Check them out here.

Keene

In the past few days there has been a flurry of news about e-books and e-textbooks in particular. The NYTimes ran a story on Saturday about the looming demise of the physical textbook. It does say that the physical paper textbook we know and love is not going to disappear overnight, but that now, more than ever, e-textbooks are poised to make a permanent push into the classroom. The article notes that higher education will be leading the way into this area but that K-12 schools won’t be far behind. There are issues of the digital divide with the costs of e-reader devices, but if digital textbook prices fall significantly, the price issue may not be an insurmountable obstacle in my opinion. There is the cost of the device up front, but once in hand, these devices could potentially be used for years reducing the cost of ownership. And as the market matures, the devices can potentially become low cost appliances. Since they are less complex than a full computer, they can also potentially be re-sold fairly easily or even rented to those who truly cannot afford the up-front price.   

In addition, the NYTimes article quotes CTO Sheryl Abshire from the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, LA who points out just how different students of today are from the “read the textbook” linear students that education has traditionally embraced.

Kids are wired differently these days. They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite. They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote… Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.

This fact coupled with a technology that is now maturing enough that it can be used in a widespread fashion in the classroom might just be enough to usher in a new digital age of learning. Who would have imagined that the venerable paper textbook might one day be just be a memory, but in a few more short generations of higher ed students and the legions of K-12 students behind them, this may just be the case.

To add some more fuel to the fire, today, CourseSmart has just released an iPhone/iPod Touch app that allows access to its large textbook library. The iPhone app is free but it only works if you are a paying customer using CourseSmart’s desktop application. CourseSmart is one of the largest e-textbook publishers out there right now so adding an iPhone app to the mix will only help get their content more mobile. It should be noted that CourseSmart knows that trying to learn and write on an iPhone or Touch is tricky so they tell you the iPhone app is really meant to compliment the desktop software as CourseWare EVP Frank Lyman notes…

Instead, it’ll provide a quick, searchable reference for use on the go when using your computer is impossible or awkward. CourseSmart EVP Frank Lyman suggested one possible scenario for how students might go about using the new program to enhance and extend their learning. “If you’re in a study group and you have a question, you can immediately access your text. (quoted from this entry at The Apple Blog)

I think this is a good point and perhaps the sweet spot for truly mobile devices like smartphones and e-readers. No one really wants to try and read a full text book on a smartphone. Your vision will get blurry long before you graduate. But as noted by Mr. Lyman, they are great tools for looking up information, sharing information and enabling in situ research and collaborative, contextual learning. Used in conjunction with a larger e-reader device or a full blown laptop or desktop system, students can use both together to enhance their learning in new ways.

Another story on the jkOnTheRun blog about the heating up of the e-book space also aired today. I like their point about its not the device, but the content. Indeed, we need to make sure that educational content remains as open as is reasonable. Publishers should be able to make money, but not hold students hostage with excessively high rates for books. As this whole market matures, I can imagine scenarios where students rent e-textbooks or have subscriptions with publishers while also using more freely available content from blogs, websites, etc. which the NYTimes article points out. Learning truly becomes a fluid exercise in a digital world where nothing is set in stone so to speak.

As Amazon preps release of their large format Kindle DX into the higher education space this Fall and Apple prepares a new tablet like device along with Barnes and Noble teaming up with Plastic Logic to offer another compelling device to the market, the e-book wars look like they are just beginning. Like the digital rights management issues that the music and movie industries have long wrestled with, content for educational textbooks and e-books in general is about to get thrown into this in a big way. It may be a bumpy ride, but like it or not, e-books and e-textbooks are coming to a school and student near you perhaps sooner than you think.

In July, Thomas Freedman of the The New Democratic Leadership Council published a short call to arms paper about outfitting every school child with a eTextbook reader. He heavily refers to Amazon’s Kindle, including it even in the title of the paper A Kindle in Every Backpack: a proposal for eTextbooks in American Schools. The paper outlines plenty of good reasons why our education systems should embrace eTextbooks and their associated e-readers. These are very clear. However, I think to get the impact Mr. Freedman is advocating, two things need to be addressed which are not mentioned in the paper. One is that instead of a particular device such as an Amazon Kindle, the focus should be on a universal, open source format. This format can deliver the textbook content to many different e-reader devices instead of just one or two that work with a proprietary format. And second, the technology Freedman mentions that kids want is not exactly ready for the e-readers of today. Let’s take a look at these two critical areas as they are important to this discussion.

Amazon’s Kindle format is fairly closed and the tight control Amazon exerts over it was evident recently when George Orwell’s 1984 was yanked digitally off the devices without the owners knowing it until after the fact. It caused quite a stir and had Jeff Bezos candidly apologizing for this. In this day and age, closed formats need to tread very lightly and e-books are no exception. Yes, I understand that we need to deal with copyright and rights management. Hopefully the lessons of the music industry can be applied to this nascent area of technology. The Kindle does support other formats which are more open as well in all fairness, but they are clear that they want you to buy your content from them.

As it stands now, there are plenty of proprietary formats already floating around from Amazon, Sony and soon, Barnes and Noble when they work with Plastic Logic to deliver e-books. Now, I can understand that distributors would want to seal off competiors by making their devices only read their proprietary format, but for educational purposes, this is not a good thing and so I think it should be clearly stressed that for such a national inititiative, an open e-reader format should be embraced and supported, perhaps with government support. Don’t let one tech company lock everyone into one format. Keep the eTextbook format by demanding, by law, that eTextbooks should be as openly accessible as possible. Just as paper textbooks can be loaned, shared and exchanged easily in the traditional book format, so too should an eTextbook. Learning cannot be proprietary.

Enter the Portable Document Format (PDF) that has become our ubiquitous digital document format. While it was created and is controlled by Adobe Systems, they have given the PDF format a long enough leash that it is supported on all major platforms and is quite portable in the digital domain. And while PDFs can have some embedded multi-media, this is far from the norm. Its mostly text and images that you get with a PDF. Many of the current e-readers do support the PDF format and can display their contents on the E-Ink screens. The viewing mileage you get out of looking at PDF on something like a Kindle or Kindle DX will vary. Its not great but it works on the E-Ink screens. E-Ink is developed by a private company and licensed out to the manufacuterers who want to use the E-Ink screens on their devices. The big problem with PDFs on e-readers, especially the smaller ones, is that the documents are static. The images and words do not flow to fit neatly on the small screen for reading. You have to zoom in on a page, then scroll around to read it, or you are stuck looking at the PDF at one size such as the case with the Kindle DX, which has a large screen, but you can’t resize a PDF to suit your viewing needs. One e-reader manufacturer does make a device that is specifically for looking at PDFs. It uses its own software to take a PDF and make it fit on the page nicely with text flowing around images and fitting on the smaller screen better. Its not perfect, but its a step in the right direction. But again, we are really talking about text and images, not other types of multimedia.

This brings up the other point related to Mr. Freedman’s article. He mentions the ability for students to take quizzes and have multimedia, etc on such devices. Well, that may take some time and if that is truly desired in the near future, then one needs to look at other devices such as laptops, netbooks or tablets that have operating systems (and batteries) capable of handling video, animation, web connectivity and interactivity (i.e. Flash). He points out that about half of students questioned about what they wanted in their classrooms responded with wanting access to real time data visualized like what you get with Google Earth. As a huge fan of the GeoWeb, I could not agree more, but you are not going to get a Google Earth experience on a Kindle or other e-reader (btw, Google Earth requires some high bandwidth connectivity and a decent graphics card to really shine). E-Ink is rumored to have color screens out perhaps in the the next year or so and is playing with them in their labs now. However, for this technology to support all the multimedia goodness we are used to on our full computers, this may still be out a few years. For now, the e-reader devices promise heaps of books in your pocket (see no backpacks needed) and the ability to have instant access to your personal library. But they are mostly still a passive reading experience. And that is fine, but don’t expect them to sing iTunes and do the Flash app dance. The Kindle does have a rudimentary web browser and its Verizon Whisper sync wireless technology is nifty for delivering books, blogs and newspapers, something the other devices are lacking to a large degree, but e-readers are not multimedia machines (yet). A possible exception to the multimedia dilemma is found on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch which are quite capable multimedia devices and decent, if not perfect e-readers too. I have found the iPhone Kindle app to be surprisingly good at reading Amazon’s Kindle books. The device is always there so I read at times I normally would not, such as waiting in line to get on a plane, see a movie, etc. Its there when the moment strikes to read a few pages. In addition several iPhone apps offer decent PDF viewing experiences too such as Readdle’s ReaddleDocs app or their new PDF Expert app. AirSharing and AirSharing Pro also offer some good PDF reading capabilities. And it is highly likely that Apple will release some form of a tablet like device in the next six months that will handle multimedia along with e-books so this could perhaps bring the future to us a little faster than E-Ink screens will.

So these are my words of caution for embracing eTextbooks for all school kids. I think this needs to happen and it will happen, I just hope it happens smoothly and those that make it happen keep formats open and embrace new technology that will merge the written word with the moving image and beyond. This perhaps will get people reading in an entirely new way while transforming the learning process and moving the venerable textbook into the age of bits and bytes.

Keene

You can read the PDF (perhaps with your e-reader!) of Mr. Freedman’s paper here.

Cell phones have been around in the United States since 1983. The big brick microwave strength phones of that era have thankfully long passed, but small, sleek cell phones have also been around a good while now too. Motorola and Nokia in particular pushed the envelope. Remember the Razr? And there was Palm whose Treo was all the rage for a time. But everything changed when Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007 and the rest they say is history. Its been nothing short of a phenomenon with its elegant touch interface, bright, high resolution screen, stellar web browsing experience (aside from lack of Flash) and of course its OS, SDK and the App Store. All of this turned the idea of smartphone on its head and the industry has not been the same since. But despite Apple’s innovation, there is something else going on here and its worth thinking about for a moment. The iphone is really a metaphor for a mass move into cloud computing. Two technology writers make this point and are worth noting. In particular, I think this metaphor and their ideas will have quite an impact on education as students move their digital worlds higher and higher into the clouds, circumventing in many ways traditional IT infrastructure associated with institutions of higher learning. Writer Chris Hoff at Cisco put his finger on the pulse in his commentary on the iPhone and the Cloud with his nice post. And Fellow Cisco blogger James Urquhart succinctly summed up Hoff and added his two cents with another post on CNet.  Both are worth reading and pondering for a moment. Here are a couple of quotes pulled from these: Hoff says:

The iPhone is a fantastic platform that transforms using technology that has been around for quite a while into a more useful experience. The iPhone converges many technologies and capabilities under a single umbrella and changes the way in which people interact with their data and other people…

The thing I love about my iPhone is that it’s not a piece of technology I think about but rather, it’s the way interact with it to get what I want done. It has its quirks, but it works…for millions of people.

The point here is that Cloud is very much like the iPhone. As Sir James (Urquhart) says “Cloud isn’t a technology, it’s an operational model.” Just like the iPhone.

I think beyond just the success of the iphone, we have to look at the success of cloud computing and how the iPhone is a metaphor for cementing this way of computing into our lives and society. Its a device that has showed us the possibilities and clearly, we all want more. And clearly today’s students will increasingly use this technology more and more on devices that fit into the pockets of their jeans. A commenter on Urquhart’s post mentions that the “cloud” part of computing is soon destined for the tech talk closet since a good deal of computing is done now in the cloud and its just called computing. So perhaps we can just think of the cloud now as just part of the larger sky to use an obvious metaphor. So sky computing anyone? Whatever you want to call it, its here to stay and Apple found a compelling way to deliver this experience in a consumer device that just works.

Keene

The annual NMC Conference winds down on this third day. Its been a full two previous days and this final day is an abbreviated half day that has a morning session followed by the Excellence Award and the closing keynote.

In the final session block of the conference I attended what was my favorite presentation. Titled Connecting Mass Audiences to Ecosystems using 3D Visualizations, it was given by Dr. Fred Watson of California State University- Monterey Bay (co-sponsor of the conference this year). Watson has a team at the university that produce short animations and videos with very detailed and realistic visualizations for use in visitor centers, documentaries and online interactive projects. They target resource managers, students, researchers and the general public. The group producing this work is called EcoViz and they provide their services well beyond the walls of the university. Fred showed examples of their work in Yellowstone National Park for its main visitor center. He also showed work done in the Monterey Bay ecosystem including the Cordell Bank and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuaries. It was great stuff and all done with custom software he and his team have created. EcoViz hopes to release the software to the public in the next year or so. You can see more of these excellent projects at: http://ecoviz.csumb.edu/home/

Following this final session of presentations, was the giving of the annual NMC Center of Excellence Awards. These went to three institutions who have done ground breaking, innovative, creative work in the area of New Media. The recipients were:

Abliene Christian University, Abliene, Texas: For their ground breaking work in integrating mobile technology into the campus, particularly centered around Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch.

The Center for Digital Storytelling Berkeley, CA: For their long ongoing efforts to train and evangelize the process of digital storytelling with new media tools. For over a decade and a half they have been pioneers in the new forms of digital storytelling that is now so prevalent with Web 2.0 tools.

Universitat Oberta de Cataluna, Barcelona, Spain: Their award was given for their work in creating an open, accessible, rich online higher education experience for Spainards and others around the world.

All three of these institutions were deserving, gracious and inspirational in their work and acceptance of the awards.

Finally, the ending keynote was a tribute to pioneering technologist, Douglas Engelbart who was honored by the NMC for his achievements in interactive computing, particularly the invention of the mouse, an indispensable tool to all who use computers today. Unfortunately, my flight schedule did not permit me to see this presentation.
That wraps up a snapshot of this year’s conference. Next year it will be held again in California, but this time it will be in the LA area at Disneyland and University of California - Southern California (UCSC).
For photos of the conference, head over to Flickr where over a thousand pictures have been tagged with NMC2009 by conference attendees. This link takes you directly to the search for this tag.

Keene

Day 2 of the annual NMC conference kicked of with a delightful keynote by musician, producer and educator Marco Torres. Marco, who works with George Lucas, gave a fantastic talk about the education and how to tackle some of the issues surrounding our educational institutions. Marco is primarily an expert at K-12 education, currently with an emphasis on years 9-12. The upshot of his keynote is that story gives stuff purpose. Broadcast methods have changed and expanded drastically since the time most current teachers were students and not giving kids the ability to express themselves thorough these avenues of new media denies them a chance to learn and express themselves. He posed the question, are students producers or recipients of information? And what students are given by teachers affects them so if the options are limited for expression, it limits them in the learning process. He went on to note that several areas in the media landscape have done particularly well with high school students. The Food Channel’s Alton Brown, the Discovery Channel’s Myth Busters and the ABC’s Lost series all have extremely engaging content that is presented in different ways that engage the learning and exploration process. Alton Brown uses a variety of history, science, role playing and informal presentation about how food “works.” Myth Busters’ hosts don’t lecture to their audience, but are engaged in learning just as viewers are. Finally, the TV series Lost has exploded across many age groups an people have created wikis, mindmaps, maps, blogs and other mashups explaining the story and its many nuances and details.   

In the end Marco explained that the rigidity and outdated modes of schooling are getting in the way of learning. In a word, students find school boring. He challenges us to explore the use of multimedia and encourage its use by students, even its something that might be out of a teachers comfort zone. He gave a stunning example of a student who, on his own, learned to play five instruments and went on to do a re-interpretation of the original Star Wars soundtrack in a Mariachi style. George Lucas himself liked it so much that he hired the student. Torres’ pointed out that the school music class would not let him play because he did not play the style that the instructor was accustomed. Good food for thought.

The session I attended after this was a great introduction and overview of geotagging given by Case Western Reserve University’s Mace Mentch. He gave the overall basics of the geotagging process and presented a few examples of geotagging tools and then ran through an example of how to do geotag one’s photos. It was a good presentation that provided a clear perspective of a trend that is only going to get bigger and more prevalent for any data that has geospatial coordinates.   

Finally, the last group of sessions of the day saw me attending another excellent presentation by the University of Mary Washington’s New Media Specialist Andy Rush. Andy showed off his New Media group’s website made with WordPress and then proceeded to give a great run down of some particularly helpful WP plugins that he has used.

They are the following:

Feed WordPress: Syndicates posts from other blogs giving credit to the blog site where the post originated.

WordPress Touch: Reformats you WP site on the fly to look good on an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android device.

Dagon Sitemap Generator: Generates nice site maps of your WP site.

SimpleTags: Adds tag clouds to your WP site

FAQtastic: Very nice and easy to use

BrokenLinks: Checks for broken links on your site

CETS_embedRSS:

FlickrRSS: Embeds an RSS feed from Flickr to show sites

Theme Test Drive: Lets you preview your site with different themes applied

He wrapped up by talking about two resources he has produced those at the University. One is the Digital Media Cookbook website which provides “recipes” for using and producing digital media. The second is part of the New Media website at Mary Washington called the Digital Toolkit which provides resources and solutions for producing, editing and distributing digital media. To find these resources, one searches under the Tag cloud at the website for Toolkit. Entries under this tag will give you tips about specific technologies and techniques to apply to your digital media.

It was a great talk from a seasoned professional so there were some good takeaways.

In the last block of sessions for the day, I gave an overview of the database and search tools DEVONthink Pro and DEVONagent. Both are powerful tools for finding and organizing large amounts of database. It was attended by a small group interested in what this tool can do. The new version provides numerous new features that make it a compelling upgrade.

This wrapped up Day 2 for me. Day 3 is a half day ending wrapping up the conference.

For photos of the conference, head over to Flickr where over a thousand pictures have been tagged with NMC2009 by conference attendees. This link takes you directly to the search for this tag.

Keene

The annual summer conference for the New Media Consortium is underway in Monterey, CA. The NMC is a gathering of instructional technology specialists from approximate 300 educational and museum institutions from across the country and around the globe. Day 1 kicked off with a keynote session by Kathy Sierra, a well known tech writer for the Head First series of books by O’Reilly publishers. She is also known for helping launch Javaranch.com, a large online forum community for Java programmers and for being an Amazon Top Ten Editors Choice Computer Book author. Her session was titled “Creating Passionate Learners” and discussed ways to better engage students. Here are a few takaways from her talk:

- Get people to have an emotional reaction to something

- Conversation beats formal lecture tone

- Talk to the brain not the mind

- Offer productive ways to practice skills and make people create something that reflects their feelings

- Create a culture of practice with the skills you are teaching people to use

- And Be Nice! The world is full of quick criticism online and that is no way to further learning. Be supportive, be nice and that good karma will come around to help you out down the road .

Kathy’s session was followed by the opening sessions given by conference attendees. I gave my Google Earth presentation that was an overview of how Google Earth and Google Maps can be used in the digital storytelling process, giving examples and also showing them what tools are available so that people can do this themselves. I was very pleased to see so many people attending. It was a full house with standing room only! I received many nice compliments and met some new faces which is always a plus. Interested readers can download my list of links and resources at: http://drop.io/nmc_google_earth.

Once this was over, I attended the excellent session titled ” Telling Stories in Land and Food Systems; Future Advocates and Citizen Journalists” given by three staff from the University of British Columbia (Cyprien Lomas, Dunca McHugh, and Kathryn Gretsinger). This session described how the University of British Columbia piloted a podcast production class centered around journalism for its Agriculture students. Met with some skepticism by students at first, they soon discovered that this is a powerful tool for citizen science and they took to the project and produced some impressive results. The best was a podcast by a student who was steadfastly reluctant to do the assignments feeling she had nothing to say and did not have a story. In the end, she produced a stunning description of why soil science is important to her and why we need agricultural sciences. Her father even said “know I understand you.” All the projects were done as audio only podcasts with students learning the ropes about microphones, audio recorders and audio editing. One student did include some images too, but the emphasis was on just audio. Along the end of the way, students recorded an audio journal of the process, some of which were played at the end of the session. Students mentioned the process being meaningful and valuable as it has given them tools to engage in the art of story telling in this digital age. It also has given them way to capture the human experience as it related to their interest in soil science. Due to its success, UBC is now formalizing the class, doubling it from 6 students to 15 and will be coming up with new assignments for how these podcast tools and other multimedia can be used.   

Following this session, I attended the always excellent presentations given by Case Wester Reserve University staff. In this case the presentation was given by new media vetern Jared Bendis, the Creative Director for New Media at Case. Jared has put together a class about New Media Literacy that gave an overview of New Media, tracing is history and evolution so students could gain a perspective of the field. There was no production involved. Instead, it involved extensive reading of key literature, particular chapters in the New Media Reader publication. Jared would assign weekly readings, small essay assignments which in hindsight was difficult to grade due to the sheer volume of writing, and small activities that would engage the students such as writing a software review or critiquing a video game. All in all, I thought this was a good class to offer students who may be digital natives, but are still too young to know much about the history of multimedia and the relatively long road “new” media has taken to get us to the present.

For photos of the conference, head over to Flickr where over a thousand pictures have been tagged with NMC2009 by conference attendees. This link takes you directly to the search for this tag.

Day 2 overview will be posted shortly!

Keene

As the newspaper industry endures the pain of transition to the brave new digital world and the age old tradition of college textbooks is challenged by the Web and a slew of new electronic reading devices, Amazon is answering the call by providing digital outlets for the publishing world. The original Kindle was launched in November, 2007 and then this past February, Kindle 2 was released to great fanfare. Tomorrow, Amazon will unveil a new Kindle that is supposedly bigger and will be more appropriate for reading things like newspapers and textbooks. Should the new device be all it is trumped up to be, it could definitely shake things around further on campuses and newsrooms around the nation. The e-reader revolution is upon us and Amazon is not sitting idly on the sidelines. While there is little information about the new Kindle features other than it will be larger, the device will definitely get lots of press. What remains to be seen is how well the public will take to it. The price point will have to come down, I would imagine, for students to really take notice. At $359 its not exactly pizza change. One report noted that a Kindle is about the same price as some Netbooks but without most of the functionality of a Netbook. Its a good point. Unless you just have lots of digital information for serious reading, e-readers may not be for you, but at some point in the not too distant future I think its a safe bet that some form of e-reader will become commonplace. As the new devices proliferate, they will take some getting used to. I know people who swore they would never read news online and now that is all they do ending their paper subscriptions. With textbooks delivered wirelessly to students’ e-readers, the whole textbook market stands to be shaken as well. Watch the news tomorrow and see what Amazon has in store. It should be quite a read.

On a quieter note, Amazon recently acquired the excellent e-reader software Stanza by buying its parent company Lexcycle. Stanza is probably the best e-reader software out there so it will be interesting to see what Amazon does with its new acquisition and how it will play into the Kindle initiative.

Keene