TKC interviews "Library w/o Books" headmaster Tracy

UPDATE: 9/11/09 6:48PM PDT - Podcast 60 is ready.
UPDATE2: midnight - Podcast Extra: Library tour and actual plans
A bit of nostalgia in the image to the left... Note the laptops on the tables of course :-)
  Clicking on the image or on the next link takes you to a brief story on the surging use of the New York City Library though it's not due to the best of reasons -- but it's a good and welcome resource for those who need to find a job in a world requiring wired access.  The article's actual title is "The Library Renaissance."

The article also links back to an article in March on the library's efforts to help jobseekers and points out that "...with Web sites largely having replaced newspapers as the most common job-listing venues, finding work without Internet access has become increasingly difficult."

In connection with the recent story on "A Library Without Books," the Boston Globe article, had said that Cushing Academy had "...decided to give their collection - aside from a few hundred children’s books and valuable antiquarian works - to local schools and libraries," although the Globe's writer, David Abel, mentioned, in another paragraph, that the school's administrators had "decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks " -- many have been disbelieving that a school would do this.

 Others, as I mentioned in the Comments area, had seen this as understandable for a school library as opposed to a public library, because in a college-preparatory school like this, the library is used mainly for a quiet and WIRED place for students to go with their laptops.  Students are focused on specifically-assigned books, and the Net gives speedier search access to additional information on those assigned topics -- while a public library acts as a physical database of materials the general public can browse at leisure, though they also have considerable wired access now and terrific online-resources, generally.

  Also, most junior high and high school libraries don't have 20,000+ books in them.
 Cushing Academy has only a few hundred students and the annual fee for attending the school is between $31,200 and $42,850 -- not your average college-prep school.

The reaction has been quite divided, and Len Edgerly of the popular podcast, The Kindle Chronicles, decided to interview the apparent driving force behind the changes, headmaster James Tracy, on the school's library plan.  Many are concerned about the precedent.

  Edgerly has said on Twitter that "Globe's got it wrong" and expanded a little in an email when I asked him about this before we are able to hear the interview when it is uploaded Friday night 9/11/09 (tonight) to the Kindle Chronicles site.  He gave me permission to quote him.

' The TVs are essentially computer monitors, available for kids to work collaboratively on, with controls somehow at their seats.  Also, the Globe got it wrong - the school library will have 10k books of the 20k there now, and several other thousand are being distributed to departments. So actual reduction in volumes is about 7K or 8k...

Any volume which was donated to the school as a memorial is being retained in the collection.   They see the new library becoming the epicenter of the school for students and faculty, compared with its former reality as a little-used collection of traditional books infrequently visited by anyone...

Slide 4 caption includes this: "Cushing Junior Tia Alliy shelved a heavy volume onto a shelf holding the spared books." In fact, that shelf is one of half the original shelves still in the library." '

 That last caption is reassuring when the Boston Globe titled another caption with the contradicting "The school's new "learning center" will have no books -- they have been donated or discarded." -- unless they mean the 'spared' books will be available where they are donated.  All in all, it was a very confusing article, as it turns out.

A look at the full range of Dr. Tracy's approach to the topic can be seen in a talk he gave at a symposium, "Libraries Beyond Books: A Call for New Paradigms."  It's an interesting read, but his choice of words is not always helpful for his case, which can sound 'extreme' when he writes: "This is why, at Cushing Academy, where we are dedicated to forging the most far-sighted pedagogies for twenty-first century education, we have decided to be bookless within a year."

So, in light of all of the above, I recommend that all interested tune in to The Kindle Chronicles Podcast sometime Friday night to hear or download Len Edgerly's interview with headmaster Tracy.  There's now the podcast Extra of a tour of the library and a look at the mockup of their actual plans, with Bruce Lemieux, Director of Technology, and Susie Carlisle, Dean of Faculty and Academics.

  The weekly podcasts are also available as a free-subscription at iTunes and will remain available at the podcast site.

Amazon Winnowing Public Domain Duplicates

Amazon announced today at its Digital Text Platform forums:

' In an earlier posting, we said that we are working on improving the customer experience in the Kindle store for public domain titles like “Pride and Prejudice.”  Kindle customers often find it difficult to choose from the many different versions of the most popular titles.  As a first step, we stopped accepting additional public domain titles.  Later this week, we will be removing many of the duplicate copies of the best selling public domain titles.

 Some of you may disagree with the choice of titles we will be removing.  If you feel that your version of a public domain title has significantly more value to customers compared to the ones we have chosen to keep for sale, please contact us at title-submission@amazon.com and we will review your title.  Thanks for your patience as we continue to improve the Kindle Store.

The Kindle Team '

Scott Douglas drew our attention to this.   he also worried about 'big brother' possibilities with this and interprets the message as saying only one edition will be allowed, although Amazon says that if you prefer your version "compared to the oneS we have chosen to keep..."  they will review the title if the file-uploader contacts them.  They are talking here to those who want to upload to Amazon their own versions of public domain books.

I wrote to Scott on his post because I had first seen, courtesy of Kindlezen on Twitter that Librarian And Information Science News was reporting on Scott's post and a commenter there has a concern (as a UK observer) that Amazon might consider one's public domain books from other sources on our Kindles (many of us have lots of them from other sources) possibly bit-torrent material.  But, really, they have shown no interest in all the things we can put on our Kindles, learned from their own sanctioned Amazon forums, thanks to customers helping one another.

To Scott, I repeated what I wrote to the Librarian news site, thinking I was responding to him there.  Here is the text of what I wrote, which Scott and Librarian news site allowed to be posted right away.  I'm reposting it here so that Kindleworld blog readers can read the info also but with links to what I mentioned.

' Let's not get carried away.
The Project Gutenberg books are directly downloadable to the Kindle and have been for some time. That's 30,000 books.  The steps for doing this are on my site and others'.

Those who Kindle can get books direct to the Kindle from feedbooks.com, manybooks.net (use (mnybks.net to actually download the books to Kindle) and even fictionwise.com now owned by Barnes & Noble.

Amazon will not - after '1984gate' - be deleting any books you've purchased which were uploaded to Amazon... mainly because they'd lose their entire Kindle crowd if they did that again and they know it.
  And they certainly won't be deleting material you got elsewhere.

On the Amazon forums there is a popular and humongous thread of about 1200+ posts from which many learn about how to get books from everywhere else, and how to quickly convert them, as needed, for the Kindle.

And I've written a piece on how to quickly convert any of the million free Google books so you can read them on the Kindle.

As for the public domain books, we can get them from just about anywhere.  What customers have complained about is the never-ending proliferation of public domain books on Amazon, some of which have no table of contents, are badly formatted, have all kinds of errors, because Amazon had let everything up in the digital-publishing upload area, within a day.

They are now, from what I read on Amazon forums, doing 5-day reviews of uploaded material.  Harry Potter books were uploaded almost daily - but the author refuses to make them available for the Kindle and those are then obviously illegal uploads.  Amazon customers reported lots of occurrences of such things.

 If Amazon will have only one version of a public domain, maybe they'll choose only those with working Table of Contents hyperlinks and correctly formatted etc.  My guess is they'd have two or three Amazon-chosen ones for the free-option.  IF it were only one* and the best in their minds, for free, then that's their prerogative and we have less work to do when trying to get a book [from Amazon].  I had to download and check out samples for about 12 versions of the Devil's Dictionary and most were missing essential things like working Table of Contents.

As it turns out, the best one I found came from an individual posting at Mobileread forums and was free. So that's what I'm using.

Remember, we can read MOBI or PRC files on the Kindle and rights-unprotected documents will be converted by Amazon (for free if you send it to [you]@free.kindle.com] and then move the converted copy to the Kindle yourself.  Many of us just run it through a free converter ourselves.

- Andrys
kindleworld.blogspot.com

* As you can see -- in Amazon Kindle Team's note to those who want to upload, or have uploaded in the past, a new version of a public domain book, they mention "ones" to which the uploader's version is felt, by the uploader, to be superior.  So, I don't believe they're thinking of limiting public domain offerings of a book to only one edition but are choosing just a few from the many duplicates they already have and are now finally reviewing for quality of layout, etc. as requested by Amazon customers for some time.

(The above applies to the Kindle DX as well as Kindles 1 and 2.)

Bits and pieces - 9/8/09

Library w/o books
Re the Library Without Books story. A quick run of news column comments like the ones at Mashable indicate that many familiar with school libraries feel this is likely an ok decision because students today use the school libraries as a place to relax with their notebooks and they really don't use the stacks much.  People tend to feel differently if this had happened with a public library though.
And, it seems the coffee areas will be profit centers :-)

Google settlement
Alternet, quoting AFP's Roddy Thomson, reports that Google "will remove all European books currently on the market from a US agreement to digitise and sell online books that are out of print in the United States."  They'll have to negotiate agreements with European publishers and authors.

To see a good summary of the issues that have been problematical for other companies in connection with the much-discussed Google Settlement, see Bufo Calvin's article on this from Sunday.

Asus' coming dual-screened color e-reader
A lot of ink on this one. Endgadget discusses a prototype displayed at CeBIT last March (lots of photos from CeBIT).  In the comments to the first article, commenters question battery life, comfort in holding and using 2 screens at time in a portable -- but at the price of only about $160 and with color available, even if using more eye-straining LCD screens, this will be attractive to many.  They may offer budget and premium models once they release one of these end of the year.  No details yet.

Small E-Readers and Media Hype

The New York Times reports on the unsatisfactory experience of attempting to use the much-hyped "eTextbook" iPhone app for CourseSmart's 7,000+ textbooks.
    Click on the image at the left to get the larger image.

This is an update to earlier blog articles on CourseSmart and its e-textbooks:
  . How to Save on College Textbooks
  . CourseSmart offers 7,000 textbooks on iPhone/iPod
  . Textbooks, the iPhone, and the Kindle

The New York Times's Randall Stross does something highly irregular in this fast-paced gloss-over news-scanning Net world -- he actually tries using a product before drawing conclusions in 'killer' headlines based on little.  Too often the articles focus on "the look" of things, the 'sexiness' of a metallic or plastic form, the 'cool' factor -- if you can pocket it, it has to be better.

  As a user of nearly pocketable cameras I understand the feeling, but if the camera doesn't do the basic job for the cost, I'd not be proclaiming the smallness of it the best way to go for producing a good result or saying one doesn't need the larger cameras and they are therefore "killed" - a favorite concept for gadget hounds chasing the latest dragon slayer.

Stross points out that squeezing the contents of an enormous printed textbook -- normally using considerable space for hundreds of words, the occasional illustration and lots of "restful white space" -- into the credit-card sized space of smart-phone displays can cause a painful experience.

CourseSmart has tried, and my guess (since they did not reformat the books for the smaller display size) is that they hoped to get a more attractive deal from Amazon if the textbooks were already on the iPhone.  Otherwise, what sense does it make -- to have to buy the version for iPhone which requires a connection to the Net (even if alternately using a laptop for that e-version) and buy another version to be able to read offline in a more natural way?

Stross describes what it's like to actually use a CourseSmart textbook on the iPhone while connected online as required:

' [CourseSmart's iPhone app] uses a PDF image of each page, as does the browser-based version of its eTextbook. All of the charts, graphs and design elements are intact, but everything — including the text — is indecipherably small without zooming in.  Enlarging the text to legible size introduces the need to scroll left and right for each line, which quickly grows tedious.

  Even when used on a PC monitor or laptop, Stross says,

Generally ... just half or two-thirds of a single page is displayed at once.  Successive clicks take you to the bottom of that page, to the top of the adjacent page, and to the bottom of that page. After every page change, the screen goes blank momentarily before refreshing.

  Frank Lyman, executive vice president of CourseSmart explains that the use of the iPhone for the text can be helpful if
  " you’re standing outside of the classroom, the quiz is in 10 minutes, and you want to go back to that end-of-chapter summary that helped you understand the material.”"

  Stross continues:

' The iPhone doesn’t actually store the image files: a page must be downloaded on-the-fly when requested, which I found to take 9 to 13 seconds, using a Wi-Fi connection.  The downloaded page isn’t saved, so moving to another page, then returning, means downloading it anew.  Rummaging around for a particular passage in a chapter, easily done in a printed book, is an agonizingly long process on the iPhone. '

On August 12, when CourseSmart announced its iPhone launch, I asked this question:

"Does this mean that the students will also need to buy a hard copy text book for the "homework" portion as well as pay half the cost of another textbook in electronic format which they'd need to return to CourseSmart at the end of 180 days?"

 The New York Times reports that:

' At present, a student without a trust fund is probably not going to get both the printed textbook and a subscription that provides access to the eTextbook version; they are now sold separately.  When asked if publishers would be willing to offer both for the price of one, [Ed Stanford, president of McGraw-Hill Higher Education] said his company was considering offering the eTextbook for a “nominal” price to buyers of the print version.

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Larger format e-readers, not mentioned above but available currently:
Kindle 2   Sony Readers   Kindle DX.

Also see:
  . Sony's Upcoming Models vs Amazon Kindle
  . Some points from reports on the new Sony readers

A Library Without Books

As a Kindle enthusiast, I found the following news not only jarring but very sad, since I imagine that most Kindle users will be people who love books.
  At first I thought the story couldn't be true, but a sample statistic they give of actual usage of the library was also grim.

The Boston Globe's David Abel reports on the mind-boggling decision by Cushing Academy administrators to discard all their books in favor of a digital future.  James Tracy, headmaster, sees books as "an outdated technology, like scrolls before books."

The academy will spend $500,000 to instead create a 'learning center' -- with reading stacks replaced by "three large flat-screen TVs" projecting Internet data and by "special laptop-friendly study carrels."

In place of the rejected books will be "18 electronic readers made by Amazon and Sony," which will be stocked with digital material.  Those with no access to e-readers will be expected to do research and read assigned text on their own computers.

' Instead of a traditional library with 20,000 books, we’re building a virtual library where students will have access to millions of books," said Tracy, whose office shelves remain lined with books.  “We see this as a model for the 21st-century school."

  The feeling is not universal there.  Librarian Liz Vezina says she never imagined being the director of a library without books. And ...

' Alexander Coyle, chairman of the history department, is a self-described "gadget freak" who enjoys reading on Amazon’s Kindle, but he has always seen libraries and their hallowed content as "secular cathedrals." ... A lot us are wondering how this changes the dignity of the library, and why we can’t move to increase digital resources while keeping the books. "

But there are others who are in step with headmaster Tracy:

' "We see the gain as greater than the loss," said Gisele Zangari, chairwoman of the math department, who like other teachers has plans for all her students to do their class reading on electronic books by next year.  "This is the start of a new era." '

Others lament the decision, of course.   But here are other views that were also surprising, and the sample statistic I mentioned is also shocking to me:

' Yet students at Cushing say they look forward to the new equipment, and the brave new world they’re ushering in.

Tia Alliy, a 16-year-old junior, said she visits the library nearly every day, but only once looked for a book in the stacks.  She’s not alone.  School officials said when they checked library records one day last spring only 48 books had been checked out, and 30 of those were children’s books.

"When you hear the word ‘library,’ you think of books," Alliy said. "But very few students actually read them. And the more we use e-books, the fewer books we have to carry around."

Jemmel Billingslea, an 18-year-old senior, thought about the prospect of a school without books. It didn’t bother him.

"It’s a little strange," he said. "But this is the future." '

Amazon said to be offering '1984' book/notes or credit to affected users - Update

UPDATE 9/5/09 is at the bottom of this entry.

  Gizmodo's Rosa Golijan reports that 'reader Shinobiwan wrote in with an e-mail received from "order-update@amazon.com' reminding Shinobiwan that on July 23, Jeff Bezos made an apology to Amazon customers for "the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle" and said it was "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles..."

  The e-mail, signed "The Kindle Team," continued:

  As you were one of the customers impacted by the removal of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" from your Kindle device in July of this year, we would like to offer you the option to have us re-deliver this book to your Kindle along with any annotations you made.  You will not be charged for the book.  If you do not wish to have us re-deliver the book to your Kindle, you can instead choose to receive an Amazon.com electronic gift certificate or check for $30.

  Please email Kindle customer support at kindle-response@amazon.com to indicate your preference.  If you prefer to receive a check, please also provide your mailing address.

  We look forward to hearing from you.

  Sincerely,

  The Kindle Team

Gizmodo isn't in a forgiving mood, as their photo of a Kindle displaying a finger shows.

  The brouhaha has been called "1984Gate" and I gave my take on the dispute July 31.

  Amazon doesn't mention which edition they're offering to re-deliver.  Of the lower-cost ones on product pages which might be similar to the 99-cent copy that wasn't legally sold, I see that:
 1984, published by Synergy House Publications (June 22, 2009) - $1.99, is shown as "not available" -- and another recently uploaded version of the book for $2.98 is also "not available."  The one available is $9.99, so maybe Amazon has authorization to re-deliver the MobileRef book with matching annotations to affected customers after some agreement was reached with the copyright holder.

Just saw the Wall St. Journal report on this.

UPDATE 9/5/09 (No date change being made on posting as updates are not key.)
  I enjoyed the reaction from PCAdvisor's David Coursey, UK, wrote:

" That's good news, and Amazon is known for doing right by customers, but in offering $30 cash compensation, the company probably went a little overboard.
  I'd have offered $19.84. '
(And if Amazon sent me such a cheque, I'd have framed it). "

  The Morning Call reported that "Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said Friday that the company now has the proper rights to distribute the Orwell books."

  Reuters' Alexei Oreskovic wrote " Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener said the move was unrelated to the lawsuit, and said the company does not comment on active litigation. "

Weekend books reminder: free and under $1 ones - Update2

UPDATE 9/4/09 - Two featured free books 8/29 are back to $9.60 as of today.
  So, if at all interested in a newer free book, download it while you can.
  I'll look for other interesting ones this weekend.

REGULAR UPDATE: 8/29/09 - Original posting was 7/26/09.
    These two books were free but now cost $9.99.  They're here for the record.

I'm not around much on the weekends - so, for the many new readers who visit each day and for those who don't usually have time to explore the right-hand column of more permanent links to useful tips and information, I'll highlight the "Free [or low-cost] Kindle books box from that side-column.

The book above is Raising Jake by Charlie Carillo, and the book on the left is The Sari Shop Widow by Shobhan Bantwal.

  Click on the images to get the details for each book.
      Both are $0.00 currently. As of 9/4/09, these are both $9.60 now. The free books that are newer ones are often temporary promotional items by Amazon, and it's hard to know which ones are.


Besides the usual new $$$-books, we can enjoy Classics for free, both from Amazon and from other book sites, many directly downloadable to the Kindle.  A few are promotional and free for only a while.

1.  Amazon's 7,000+ free books, sorted by:
        "Bestselling" or by "Avg Customer Review"

2.  Amazon's currently free  Non-Classics - This one changes.

    a. That link above is to Non-Classics sorted by BESTSELLERS.
    b. Here are Non-Classics sorted by NEWEST first.

3.  "Big Deals on Kindle" - This one doesn't change enough.

4.  Project Gutenberg e-books (MOBI ed) catalog for Kindles.  You can search the catalog on your Kindle and click on one to have it downloaded to your Kindle from the site.  There are no Amazon charges on a download from this site.

5.  A long Amazon Forum thread on a million or so books readable on the Kindle - How to get them (mostly free)

ALSO, previously featured free non-fiction books that are free or under $1.00
1. (Recommended under-$1 books)

2. Amazon's most popular free books.

AND remember Michael Rubin is offering, for a limited time, the full text of his $35 "Droidmaker" book on George Lucas and Lucasfilm via a set of 3 PDFs.  The photos from the book are included.

Some of this will be redundant, but at least there are a lot of choices for people on a budget.

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Updated 8/29/09