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  • A Kindle Request

    By Joshua Kim September 9, 2009 9:17 pm EDT

    Dear EDUCAUSE: Please Kindle Your Publications

    This week I checked out our Library's Kindle 2 so I could test the thing myself.

    My main need is to be able to manage my professional reading. Many PDFs cross my desk, and I end-up carrying lots of print-outs around. It would be ideal to have these all in my e-book reader.

    Why Kindle? Well ... I'm very much hooked into the Amazon ecoystem and I may want to also read a book or two.

    My first experiment was with the EDUCAUSE Review.

    I was able to get this months copy on my Kindle .... but it was sort of painful. The steps involved downloading the PDFs one-by-one from the site, using Stanza desktop to convert the PDF to Kindle format (one-by-one) and then uploading them back to the Kindle.

    After all that work the formatting still gets sort of messed up.

    The native PDF reader in the Kindle DX is probably reason enough to go with the DX if I were to purchase a Kindle today (I'm not...I'm going to wait into the next generation).

    So my request to EDUCAUSE - please provide a (free) Kindle ready (and other e-book ready) file on your site for all your publications. Or make the e-book file (please one file per issue) available to EDUCAUSE members. I'm not sure of the business model, but I am sure going forward that publishers (including professional journals) will need to provide e-book formats.

    Is anyone out there using e-book readers to manage and keep up with their professional reading? How's it working out for you?

    Has anyone tried to Kindleize a whole course? Or make a whole course available in an open e-book standard? Seems that having all the text content of a course, including articles and book chapters, available has one e-book file would go a long way toward making course reading more convenient. I could imagine a CMS extension that allows an instructor to push a button that will automatically create the an e-book version of all the text course content. Is anyone working on a course Kindle application?

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Comments on A Kindle Request

  • I don't use closed platforms :-)
  • Posted by Dr. Pepper on September 10, 2009 at 9:45am EDT

  • I do all my professional reading on the desktop, or on an iPhone (I guess you could argue that the iPhone is a closed platform). While the kindle is a nice consumer device, I would be skeptical of any professor who mandated that all their textbooks will be on kindle. It would be nice if said professors made their PDFs kidle-safe, however the way I see it is this: PDFs are pretty much universal, and the amount of students who have kindles are very few - so to expend time and resources to make PDFs kindle friendly is a bit much.

    The kindle is interesting, but if I proprietary DRM formats make me run screaming in the opposite way.

  • Yet-one-more format
  • Posted by Jim Farmer , Tech Advisor at instructional media + magic, inc. on September 10, 2009 at 9:45am EDT

  • Several years ago higher education participated in the development of the PDF/A standard. The standard did not include any format that would require licensing. The Library of Congress and the British Library agreed to provide software to read the PDF/A software for 100 years. The format was intended to ensure digital documents could be read in the future and by all compliant software. The lesson learned came from microfilm where the Library of Congress has to maintain over a 100 aging microfilm readers to support all of the formats that were used. (The microform room resembles a museum).

    However, I must admit I have never seen a PDF/A document (except mine, of course) created by an author in a college or university. This lack of interoperability now has a cost in time and sofrtware maintenance.

    Perhaps a conversation with your librarian would suggest another course of action--support of the standards they developed. And if many of us do, perhaps Amazon will also understand why they should support at least documents using the ISO PDF/A specification. If so, the librarian would thank you.

  • Good questions
  • Posted by UMG on September 10, 2009 at 10:15am EDT

  • Joshua, I have many of the same questions. As someone who has not (yet) purchased a Kindle, I would love to hear how others are using it for work.

    Also, are there any education association or nonprofit publishers making their publications Kindle ready?

  • To Kindle or Not to Kindle
  • Posted on September 10, 2009 at 10:15am EDT

  • I can understand why you would want to view PDFs on a Kindle without conversion and artifacts. Perhaps a uniform standard? Wait, that's what PDFs are. Instead of others converting all of their materials to Kindle, perhaps Amazon can make the Kindle compatable with PDF. After all, we know they can make mass changes without physical access to the devices as when they recently deleted books that people had already downloaded.

  • Backwards
  • Posted by John on September 11, 2009 at 8:00am EDT

  • I agree with others: it's the Kindle that needs to read standard PDF's, not content creators who need to make special files for the kindle.

    THere are other options for readers, and there will be more. Amazon needs to change its model, or it's going to lose.

  • Format wars
  • Posted by TyAnn , Academic Affairs at Wartburg College on September 12, 2009 at 4:00pm EDT

  • We are following this closely. With Sony's announcement that they are dropping their proprietary format for the open ePub format things will get interesting. Also the long-rumored-yet-to-be-seen Apple tablet may turn things upside down if Apple can do to the publishing industry what it did to the music industry - buy a chapter or an entire book - things will change and fast.

    In the meantime. Project Gutenberg is making books available in Kindle format. A catalog is available at http://freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html

  • Thanks!
  • Posted by Catherine at EDUCAUSE on September 14, 2009 at 3:45pm EDT

  • We are delighted you are taking EDUCAUSE Review with you in your travels! Mobility and mobile content are on our radar, and we’ll definitely take into account your blog post as well as the comments found here as we plan for the future…=)

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