No Flu, but a new Kindle

So Brian doesn't have the flu, of any variety. He's just sick. He was prescribed antibiotics though -- you know, just in case they help.

Gary is not acknowledging that he is sick too, which is fine.

He is also having second thoughts about the job in The City. He feels badly about telling them that he doesn't want it after all this, but maybe he will. I told him that he could say that he couldn't work out the transportation or that his mean parents wouldn't let him. He thought he might go with the transportation.

I'm not really sure what his real reasons are. The transportation problem might be the big one. Now that the job is real and he actually has to work out the details he can see how complicated it all is.

Wednesday Amazon is supposed to be announcing a new, bigger Kindle which might be good for newspapers and magazines and maybe is really about textbooks. On one hand I look forward to the day when all the textbooks are electronic. Publishers must look forward to it too since it would severely undercut the used book market. I still have my doubts that the Kindle will be the right platform though. As I said before, textbook publishers are already beginning to sell popular books on-line direct to students. Textbooks are marketed directly to educators. Amazon doesn't seem to have anything to offer textbook publishers except lower profits.

I could be wrong, of course.

Kindle: not for textbooks

I think that etextbooks are going to happen. People who buy and use textbooks are not generally emotionally attached to the physical book. College students resell them when they can; they don't tend to want to line their walls with them. No one likes lugging the things around. You also know that I think that the college bookstore model has broken down. We will move to etextbooks.

But Amazon is not well-positioned to be the source of those books.

When you want to buy a novel you go to a bookstore, physical or on-line. When I want to pick out a textbook, I go to the publisher. I pull a catalogue out of my desk, go to their web site, or send an email to the representative who contacts me every now and then. Actually, if I regularly use textbooks (rather than novels or books published by academic presses), I don't even have to do that. The publishers all know that I teach logic and so they send me, unrequested, exam copies of new logic books. If I am thinking about changing I just need to look at the stack of books that have been sent to me recently.

Textbook publisers are catching on that this is a good business model. At least they are experiementing with it. They are now selling their most popular textbooks on their web sites. Students can pay for the right to read it there from any computer, or to download it to one computer and print it once.

And the students like it.

No one really wants to read a novel on a computer screen, but a calculus book? Sure. Why not? Even a sociology text book can be read on the computer. It's not like you would have taken the five pound book into the tub with you. Besides, the publishers charge significantly less for these electronic copies, often less than the student would pay for a used book.

The publishers are making all the profit on this model. If they sell the text books through Amazon they have to give Amazon a cut and Amazon simply has nothing to offer them that they need.

I do think, or rather I hope, that it will be possible to download these textbooks onto an ereader, but I think the business model will have to be one in which the seller of the ereader is not planning on getting a cut on the sale of the books. If the Kindle for textbooks that we hear rumors about will not allow me to download a book that I have purchased directly from the publisher, it isn't going to happen. (Right now you can down-load unprotected free books onto your Kindle, but nothing you have bought from another vendor).

As far as using the Kindle in the classroom with other sorts of books, there is another HUGE problem: no page numbers. If I ask my students to read Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, or Jane Austin's Emma, I am going to ask them to order the same edition. This is so we can all easily find the same passage. Now, if they all have the book on some electronic platform, people can search for a phrase and all get to the same place. However, if some have paper and some have electronic version, well, right now we are in trouble.

Kindle 102 -- DRM and Sharing Books

If you already know about Digital Rights Management (DRM) skip this post.

DRM is code that is put into an electronic file so that you can't copy it and share it with the world. If you are able to borrow audio books from Netlibrary you are familiar with it. The DRM that comes with the book allows you to listen to the book for a couple of weeks. After that it just doesn't work any more, unless you go to the web site and renew it. You also know, if you are a patron of Netlibrary that iPods and Zunes don't work with Netlibrary's DRM code.

The Amazon DRM for books is tight. When you buy the book, you are really only buying the right to read the book as long as you have a Kindle and Amazon continues to exist. The Kindle 2 does not accept external memory. You can back up as much as you want at Amazon, which is convenient, but it also means that Amazon has all your reading material. You cannot sell your ebook or even loan it without loaning out the Kindle. If Amazon thinks you have been trying to hack the books, they can wipe out your library at any time. If you sell your Kindle you have to deregister it and whoever buys it will not have any of the books you bought.

You can share books but only if you share an account.

So if you and your partner/spouse/child each have Kindles on one account you will have the same library of books. You will also have the same method of payment. As far as I know, if your kid grows up, moved out and gets a Kindle on their own account, they can't take the books you bought them without taking the entire account. Now maybe Amazon customer service will have a way of dividing a library of books, but so far as I know that is not currently possible.

This is, I think, the biggest downside of buying ebooks from Amazon.

As I professor who loans books to students this is one of those downsides that leaves me with an "aw shucks" sort of feeling.

Kindle 101

I took my Kindle to work today and showed it to a couple of people. They asked me some questions that made it clear they didn't really know much about it, so I thought I would explain how the thing works.

There have been ereaders around for a while. You can buy ebooks from several different sites on the web and there are places where you can get free ones. With most ereaders you get the book from the web, download it to your computer, and then transfer it to your ereader. Kindles work differently.

So..to buy a Kindle you have to go to the Amazon web site and order it. When you do you will, of course, give them a credit card number or some other payment method. Unless you go back to the web site later, that payment method is what Amazon is going to use to charge you for any books you buy. It is like any other purchase on Amazon, and some time later your Kindle shows up.

When you get the Kindle you turn it on it connects wirelessly to Amazon and registers itself. In the upper left hand corner it will say something like, "Yondalla's Kindle." Amazon calls the wireless service it uses the "whispernet" but it is really the Sprint cell phone system. You don't have to worry about that though. You don't have to own a cell phone and you certainly don't have to own a Sprint cell phone. You just need to live somewhere that gets the service. Check here. I think that if you live somewhere that does not have service you can download to your computer and transfer, but I'm not sure.

So now you have your Kindle and it is registered and Amazon has your credit card information. Now you need to get books. You can do that in two ways with Amazon.

Method 1: Go to Amazon, search for books, and click "buy it now with 1-Click." It will tell you that the book will be on your Kindle in about a minute. If you haven't turned off the wireless function to save battery life, that will be true. You will sit and stare at your Kindle while nothing at all happens for about a minute. Then the book will show up. If your wireless was turned off when you ordered the book you will have to turn it on, click "menu" and then select "sync and check for items" before it downloads.

Method 2: Click "menu" on the Kindle. If the wireless is turned off, turn it on. Select "Shop in Kindle Store." Watch the little circle thing spin for a minute. You will see a list of some books that are recommended for you and some links for browsing. If you know what book you want to read, just type. You don't have to select anything. Just type the title or author when the store front opens. Then click "search" and wait to find out if they have the book. If they do, click "buy" and in a minute, it will be on your Kindle.

If you use Method 2, you do not have to be near your computer. You do not have to be in a wifi hot spot. You do not have to own a cell phone or anything. You can be sitting in the car while your partner drives and decide you want something to read.

Here's another cool thing, if you aren't sure you want to buy it you can click "Send a Sample Now" and you will get the first chapter or so. You can read that. If you like it, you can buy it.

It is really easy. Really, super easy.

It's like the main purpose of the devise is to make buying books an impulse decision so that you will give them lots and lots of money.

Oh, if you live with people you don't trust, guard it. Cause it is WAY easy to buy books on it.

Did I mention that buying books might even be too easy?

Requiring a password wouldn't be a terrible idea, Amazon.

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FREE BOOKS:
Amazon has about 7000 books that you can download free. There are other sites that have free books you can read on the Kindle, but those you will have to download to the computer and transfer to the Kindle with the provided cable. See Suesqueak's comment on the previous Kindle post.

YOUR DOCUMENTS
You can have your own documents (e.g. word) sent to the Kindle. Amazon will format them for the Kindle free. You can either have them sent to an email address and then load them yourself or you can pay 10 cents to have them sent to your Kindle wirelessly.

Answers re: Kindle 2 (updated)

I will update this post if/when there are more questions. Before I get to the questions there is something else I want to tell you. It isn't easy to tell when the Kindle is doing what you told it to do. For instance when you buy a book it supposed to be delivered in under a minute. It isn't like downloading something from the Internet. When you do that you see a little progress bar and can watch as it slowly download. With the Kindle it is more like nothing happens for almost a full minute and then the book is loaded in five seconds. Presumably the book has been bouncing off cell phone towers.

There are other times when I find myself wondering if the Kindle is doing what I asked it to do (like search for something) because nothing seems to be happening. I did finally notice the little circle in the upper left hand corner that whirls when it is working.

1. Are there illustrations: yes. They are of course black and white, but they are pretty good.

2. Is it worth the cost? Well, for me yes it was. Part of it was that I started giving myself an allowance and I did want to save up to do something with it. It's been a long time since I have been in that situation, having a certain amount of money every month for whatever and then picking out a goal for it. I might have just saved it, but I think I was also demonstrating to my family that it can be done.

I also need to buy more books impulsively, which I know sounds strange. I don't read as much as I should in my field because I talk myself out of paying for the books. I can order them for the library but that process takes so long that by the time they get here they just aren't as compelling. I am hoping that more and more of what I want to read is available. If I still have to buy many paper books I will be frustrated.

Will it be worth it for you? If you mean will you save money over buying paper books that obviously depends upon how many books you buy and whether/how often you replace or upgrade your Kindle. If you read classics it's a steal. You can get the collected works of Shakespeare, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens (and quite a few more) for under $5 each. Most new releases are $10. My main goal isn't saving money. It's instant gratification. Deciding you want to something and then having it in under a minute is pretty cool.

3. Will the price go down? I don't think it will by much. Your cell phone is cheap(er) because much of the price is rolled into the cost of service over the lifetime of the contract. Amazon has rolled the cost of wireless delivery via Sprint into the cost of the machine and books.

4. What's with the cat on the mat? Well, there was a spell in which it seemed that everyone who wanted to talk about meaning and reference or the correspondence theory of truth used "the cat is on the mat." It has become a sort of philosophical joke. My colleague has a section of wall in his office covered with photos and drawings of cats on mats. When I came here and saw it I laughed out loud. No one else sees why it is funny. To be fair, the most over-used sentence-as-example in philosphy is "a bachelor is an unmarried man."

We philosophers are a wild and crazy crowd.

Updates:
5. Further notes: if you buy a Kindle book from Amazon and the wireless is turned off on your Kindle, you should select "synch and check for items" on your Kindle when you turn the wireless back on.

6. Do I think that paper books will be totally replaced? No, I don't, although it is possible we will come close. Children's books though I think will remain in paper for a very long time. Even when Ereader screens are bigger and in color, it won't be the same. Though I find I don't miss the feel of paper in my hands, I think children in particular need to be able to see and hold books.

Ereaders can't replace scholarly books until there is a standard method for citation. I don't imagine right now that I could get an article published using Kindle location numbers.

Theoretically, it could come close. I can imagine a world in which ebooks have replaced paper books the way email has replaced letters ... although I still see cards and children's books in that world.

Kindle 2 -- my first impressions

Okay, so for the record, I have had my Kindle for less than a day and it is the only Kindle I have ever seen in real life. I have read reviews of the Kindle 1, but never touched one. I will probably write more about it later, but here's for now.

Hardware: With the cover (the one Amazon sells) it weighs about one pound (I have a postage scale), which turns out to be a little heavier than I want to hold in one hand for any length of time. Clearly, I could stand to develop a bit more strength in my hands and wrists. However, if you scrunch down in the recliner and rest it on your chest, it works really well.

It looks like it should have a bigger screen. There is white plastic all around the screen and it seems like wasted space. I'm willing to assume that there is some reason having to do with the hardware inside the machine that dictates this, but it would be nice if the device were smaller or the screen bigger.

I know that people complained about accidentally pushing the buttons on the Kindle 1 and that is not a problem with the Kindle 2. I read for several hours straight last night and never accidentally turned a page. There is this five-way joystick thingy. It works okay, and it allows you to highlight/underline one word at a time which I hear you couldn't do before, but it I can't help but think there should have been a better way. Don't ask me what; I'm a user not a designer. There is a keyboard on the bottom which you need for searching and writing any notes you want. It feels a lot like a cell phone keyboard but the Kindle is just wide enough that it is a bit uncomfortable for my little hands.

Does all this sound like I don't like it? I do like it. It does exactly what it should do. It lets me read books.

The screen is light grey and the words are black. It is not back lit, which means that your eyes don't get tired like when you stare at the computer screen all day. It does mean you can't read in the dark, but you can read ouside in the sun (for those of you who do that sort of thing). When you turn the page the screen flicks to black and then back to grey with black letters. It is a bit jarring. Hopefully they will develop something gentler on the eyes. However, I spent 2 hours reading Coraline (all of it). I got engrossed in the book and the world went away like it does when you are engrossed in the book. I didn't notice the words-black screen-words flicker any more than I would have noticed my hands turning pages. I fell asleep re-reading Locked Rooms in bed last night. The flickering thing wasn't annoying enough to prevent me from nodding off.

You can switch the type face from very small to very large very quickly.

Making notes in the book doesn't work exactly like I thought it would, but it is pretty cool. Basically you can add endnotes to the text. You move the cursor to where you want to the note to appear, click, type in the box below, enter. In the text there is a number (just like for an end note). When you cursor is over it, the box on the bottom shows up and you can read your note. You can also go to one page and read all your notes for the entire book. However, it works backwards. Let's say I was reading a text and I want to quickly find certain passages. I expected my notes page to look like this:

1. Conclusion of first passage here.
2. Example of cat on the mat.
3. Did he really say this?

I then thought that if my cursor was over the number or the note, the pop up text box would quote the original text. However, it is the other way around. What I see are passages from the text:

1. Therefore we can see that all people are silly.
2. The "cat is on the mat" is an over-used example in contemporary philosophy, however
3. Plato is an over-rated philosopher.

I see my notes in the pop up box. Not a big deal, but I had imagined being able to outline a book and then seeing the outline on the notes page. In any case, when you click on something in the notes page, you return to that part of the text.

I had read that the organization for books was poor and I am here to tell you that it IS REALLY FREAKING AWFUL. I mean, WOW HOW COULD IT BE THIS STUPID? On the home page you can see ten titles at a time. You can organize them by title, author, or most recent (with newly purchased books and anything you have recently read on the top). If you have twenty books you will have two pages to flick through. If you have 1,500 (which they say you could) then you would have to flick through 150 pages. Of course you can search for a book, but you better remember everything you own. There are no folders, no tags, nothing. You can archive things to the Amazon web site which takes them off your Kindle. There on the site you should be able to search and browse more quickly, but there are no good organization tools there either so far as I can tell. This would be an incentive for buying "collected works" as much as possible because the collection would work like a folder.

I've been intrigued by ebook readers for quite a while. I haven't bought one for the simple reason that the books that I need most to read were not available. I don't want an ereader primarily so that I can have something/anything to read when I have dead time. I want it to read the things I want to read. That includes novels, but it also includes books from academic presses. Many of these are coming out on the Kindle for reasonable prices, and there is no other reader for which that is true. So last evening I read Coraline. Now I am reading Experiments in Ethics by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Well, I am reading the sample chapter. I may buy the rest of it later today.

One more thing. When it is turned off, you get a portrait of some famous author on the screen. It is black and white, of course, but now that there are sixteen shades of grey, it looks pretty good.

If you have questions, ask away.