Two interesting articles on reading showed up yesterday. I couldn't resist. The New York Times ran an article by Alexandra Alter, "Line by Line, E-Books Turn Poet-Friendly." Readers (or writers) of poetry know that poems have a structure that matters. Line breaks, spacing and placement of words matter intensely to how the poem will be read and perceived.

So when the first e-books of poetry appeared a few years ago, the poet authors were taken aback to see that all formatting had been removed! According to Alter, at least one leading poet, John Ashbery requested his publisher withdraw the digital editions of his poetry books.

But now, e-books have managed to deliver digital versions of poetry that retain all the original formatting. The digital versions now are equivalent to print poetry editions. Some poets remain skeptical, according to Alter's article. But Ashbery just signed an agreement to release digital editions with Open Road for $15 each.

The second article yesterday was in the Wall Street Journal, by Jeanne Whalen, "Read Slowly to Benefit Your Brain and Cut Stress." Whalen reports on book clubs that are forming, not to discuss books, but to simply sit together silently and read. The article is actually a mish-mash of a bunch of different pieces of information about reading, some reported very briefly. It is possible that Whalen was severely edited. The article is frustrating because it mentions briefly a number of important points, but never fully explains them. The online article at WSJ does offer an entertaining "Test How Fast You Read" feature.

The reading club Whalen first reports on, from New Zealand, calls itself the Slow Reading Club. Slow reading is a major movement that has been growing for some years world wide. There is no particular leader, but there have been several books and a number of more in-depth popular and semi-popular articles about the process. I would recommend reading "Reading Fast, Reading Slow" by Jessica Love, from The American Scholar, Spring, 2012 for a much better explanation of the movement, and the science behind it. Love is a cognitive scientist who has done some of the investigations of reading and is a science writer and blogger.

For instance, when we read, our eyes don't smoothly sweep across the lines of text. We skip across the text, stopping periodically in what scholars of reading call "fixations." At each fixation, our eyes can take in about 4 letters to the left, and 15 to the right of the fixation point, on average. The letters at the edge of that perception range are fuzzy and may simply be guessed at in terms of general shape or lower/upper case. That information will speed up the reading at the next fixation, where those peripheral letters from the right will be more central. Meanwhile, we decode about 8 of the letters in the center of the fixation. Then we hop again, which the scholars call a "saccade." Love reports that reading scholars find that readers typically spend about 10% of reading time in those hops, "saccades," during which no reading is happening. There is a lot more detail in the article about how the reader quickly (or slowly, in the case of surprises) decodes words.

The article goes on to cover studies of speed-reading (mostly badly done), but a few of which are reliable to show that the faster you go, the less you recall. Slowing your reading, even because the text is illegible or missing some letters, increases retention of the content, apparently. Yoo-hoo, textbook editors! Here's an idea! Actually, can you imagine trying to read for class and have missing l_tt_rs? It w_uld dr_ve you cr_zy!

One thing the Whalen article on WSJ covers that is not mentioned in the older article from Dr. Love, is the research about what happens when people read online. Love mentions that most research on reading has been done online. But she does not say anything about the patterns discovered. Whalen mentions the F pattern. When readers in English (and I think other Western languages that read left to right) read web pages, researchers have found that the readers' eye movements follow an F pattern. The eyes scan completely across the page for the first few lines, then sweep down the left side of the screen. Web developers tend to know this fact and use it when they create those left hand panels and top tabs or menu bars. Or ads.

The decoration for this page is courtesy of http://weknowmemes.com/2012/08/scumbag-brain-on-reading/ (I am not sure you want to go there; I think it's not safe, but it had this nice image).

Amazon versus Hatchette, round 3 or 4

Wow. The gloves are off! It was reported a while ago that the trade press Hachette was negotiating with Amazon on pricing. This happens each year as contracts come up for renewal. But this year is being different. According to some observers, Amazon is pressing harder for more profitability (due to shareholder pressures?). And also according to some observers, the Hachette negotiation is becoming something of a test case for other publishers. The chief executive of the company, Michael Pietsch is something of a hero to literary editors, having been the guy who out-bid everybody (by a huge amount) for David Foster Wallace's novel, eventually titled Infinite Jest. Pietsch spent years mid-wifing Wallace through the final re-writes and cutting process to produce what is considered a modern classic, published by Little, Brown a subsidiary of Hachette. Pietsch is an editor-hero, and apparently a good executive, now to the parent company. Other industry insiders are watching the negotiations intensely:

“In a sense, Michael Pietsch is like ‘Horatius at the Bridge,’ ” says the literary agent and former Amazon executive Laurence J. Kirshbaum, referring to the soldier of legend who single-handedly saved ancient Rome by fighting off an invading army. “He is carrying the rest of the industry on his back.”

(from NY Times article June 2, 2014, linked above)

But after several efforts on both sides, things are breaking down big time. On Sunday, August 10, 2014, 900 authors banded together as Authors United, signing a open letter, and taking out a full page ad in the New York Times. Authors United is the brainchild of author Douglas Preston. But many authors have signed, and a number of high profile authors helped pay for the Times ad. The letter complains that Hachette authors are being squeezed in the battle between Amazon and Hachette in the following ways:

--Boycotting Hachette authors, by refusing to accept pre-orders on Hachette authors' books and eBooks, claiming they are "unavailable."

--Refusing to discount the prices of many of Hachette authors' books.

--Slowing the delivery of thousands of Hachette authors' books to Amazon customers, indicating that delivery will take as long as several weeks on most titles.

--Suggesting on some Hachette authors' pages that readers might prefer a book from a non-Hachette author instead.

The list of signatories includes many authors who are NOT Hachette authors. They just feel the practices are unfair to authors and to the consumers as well. Read the complete letter which calls on Amazon to resolve its differences with Hachette without further hurting authors or blocking or delaying shipments and sales to customers. (Over the weekend, it became known that Amazon was engaging in the same blocking/delaying tactics with another producer/publisher in negotiations with the sales giant: Disney. Might be an interesting fight, and one with a little more equal weight.)

The New York Times ad from Authors United was a little more in-your-face than the letter. The ad included the e-mail address for Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon. It reproduced the open letter, but the inclusion of Bezos' e-mail address implicitly encouraged readers to contact the man with readers' opinions on the matter.

Amazon has responded. They created a counter organization, Readers United with a web page attempting to present the history of publishing's antagonism to the introduction of the paperback book. Unfortunately for Amazon, they did a sloppy job of research, and quote George Orwell, of all people, trying to implicate him as one of those opposed to paperbacks, and trying to show that he was promoting collusion of the publishers to suppress publication of paperback books. (I think they are trying to remind folks that Hachette is among the publishers called to task by the Justice Department recently for colluding with Apple to increase pricing of e-books on the Kindle.) The web page also gives readers the e-mail address for Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch (who actually had nothing to do with the Authors United ad, as far as I know), and offers a number of rather aggressive suggestions for e-mails to him:

We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
Lowering e-book prices will help — not hurt — the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon's offers to take them out of the middle.
Especially if you're an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.

As to the quote from George Orwell, though Amazon's Readers' United page asserts that he advocated suppressing paperbacks, that simply misunderstands what he wrote:

When Orwell wrote that line, he was celebrating paperbacks published by Penguin, not urging suppression or collusion. Here is what the writer actually said in The New English Weekly on March 5, 1936: “The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if the other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.”

Orwell then went on to undermine Amazon’s argument for cheap e-books. “It is, of course, a great mistake to imagine that cheap books are good for the book trade,” he wrote, saying that the opposite was true.

“The cheaper books become,” he wrote, “the less money is spent on books.”

Instead of buying two expensive books, he said, the consumer will buy three cheap books and then use the rest of the money to go to the movies. “This is an advantage from the reader’s point of view and doesn’t hurt trade as a whole, but for the publisher, the compositor, the author and the bookseller, it is a disaster,” Orwell wrote.

(from NY Times article of 8/11/14.)

But the Orwell mis-quote has boomeranged on Amazon in the Internet world. To mis-quote and mis-represent a hero of TRUTH, mis-using his words for your own commercial purposes is a pretty bad move in the cyberworld, I think. It's especially ironic coming from the company that brought you the 99 cent 1984... and then took it away again. Actually, Orwell's original essay is pretty darned apposite. He was balancing the interests of readers, who are naturally pleased to get cheaper books (I know I am -- sorry), against the interests of authors, and all those who work in publishing, who are getting (despite what Amazon asserts), a SMALLER PIE, when books cost less. People really don't spend the same amount or MORE on books when they cost less. They buy the same number of books they were going to get in the first place, and pocket the money they saved, to buy something else. This is very nice for Jeff Bezos and Amazon, who have spread their marketing into LOTS of new areas. Amazon sells nearly everything on earth now. So they really do have a bigger pie. But for authors, and publishers, compositors, type designers, etc. -- all those folks who in print or digital worlds still are needed to produce books --- cheaper books translate to a smaller pie. No matter how Amazon wants to cut it.

There are a few voices out there supporting Amazon. Hugh Howey, Damien Walters. It's quite true that there is a balance point in the market where if you charge too much for e-books, or make them too hard to get, you will lose your market, which is the point of some of these folks. People will not pay above $9.99 or so for most trade e-books, apparently. Don't know why. But despite the fact that you save on printing and paper, and delivery, there are still sunk costs to an e-book. The author's time and the compositor still has to lay out the book in an attractive way. Anybody who has tried to read an e-book from Project Gutenberg will quickly see the difference in a nice modern lay-out compared to the less effective layouts from the books at Gutenberg that are out of copyright!

The image decorating this post is bare knuckle boxers from the 1820's - evidently a collectible print. See http://www.lordprice.co.uk/SPBX1038.html for the original site.

Mutabilis mutandi

It looks like some over-zealous programmer for Barnes and Noble set up the Nook e-reader to replace every appearance of the word "Kindle" with "Nook." That works OK when "Kindle" is a proper noun referring to their competition from Amazon. But the results look hilarious, sad, pitiable, ridiculous and outrageous, depending on your mood, when the word is a verb. Philip Howard, who blogs at Okracoke Island Journal, on May 22, 2012, noted that he was reading Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace on his Nook.

As I was reading, I came across this sentence: "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern...." Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text.

For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: "It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern...."

Someone at Barnes and Noble (a twenty year old employee? or maybe the CEO?) had substituted every incidence of "kindled" with "Nookd!"

This discovery is roaring through the blogosphere: Ars Technica tested it and found 8 instances. They include a nice screen shot highlighting an example where "Nook" in inserted for "kindle" in the text. The story also appears on Dvice.com and I originally was told it was covered on MSNBC. The Atlantic has a story on it (they couldn't resist the pun! (Tolstoy gets nookered), and The Baltimore Sun covers it, too. There are many more repeats of the story, but these are the higher profile commentators.

Probably the most insightful comments come from Kendra Albert at Jonathan Zittrain's blog The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it. First Ms. Albert recalls the classic story of the day Amazon panicked that they had not gotten proper copyright clearance for George Orwell's 1984, and yanked it from all e-readers without notice. Even people reading it had it disappear, notes and highlights and all, quite suddenly. Amazon gave back the 99 cents everybody had paid, but it did not diminish the sense of outrage, or the sense of irony, because of the text.

Then, playing off that experience with the extreme mutability of e-texts, Albert continues to examine the Kindle to Nook event. She comments that the change probably happened when the company that formatted the text, Superior Formatting, a contractor for Barnes and Noble, ported the text. They probably do the same work for Amazon, and may insert ads for the Kindle in work that they do for that company. So they probably did a search and replace to find and replace all the ads for the Kindle e-reader over the ads for the Nook. It just wasn't well-thought-out, and now, they look pretty stupid. Or, Barnes and Noble look stupid, which is worse!

The unwitting hilarity of a publisher doing a “find and replace” and accidentally changing the text of a canonical work of Western thought is alarming. Many versions of e-books are from similar outfits, that distribute public domain works formatted for Kindle or Nook at the lowest possible prices. The great democratizing factor of the ebook formats – that anyone can easily distribute – can also mean that readers can never be quite sure that they are viewing the texts as the author intended.

Interestingly enough, we seem to have come a full circle. The earliest job of the great scholars and librarians was to recognize the correct copies of the classics, and weed out the incorrect copies. When everything was copied by hand, it was very easy for errors and changes to creep into those scrolls and manuscripts.


Tip of the OOTJ hat to my colleague Spencer Simons at University of Houston. The illustration of Tolstoy came from the Atlantic article, and is credited to the Wikimedia Commons, which credits it to Nikolai Gei, translated in English as Leo Tolstoy at His Desk, painted around 1870.

Wait, just a darned minute... the sky isn't falling!

I was flipping through the May 1, 2012 issue of Library Journal, when I was amazed to see a very short item in News Desk (page 11 in print) about the Libraries Online Incorporated (LION) a consortium of 25 Connecticut public, academic and school libraries boycotting new purchases of e-books from Random House. There is actually a fuller story online at Library Journal's Digital Shift. On March 2, Digital Shift covered a huge price increase, of as much as 300%, imposed by Random House on libraries buying their e-books. An e-book that cost $40 one day jumped to $120 the next, while the print version remains at $20 with the library discount! Random House is the only large publisher to make its e-books available to libraries without onerous restrictions, according to the article, but this is their rationale for the price increase:

“We believe our new library e-pricing reflects the high value placed on perpetuity of lending and simultaneity of availability for our titles,” said Stuart Applebaum, a Random House spokesperson. “Understandably, every library will have its own perspective on this topic, and we are prepared to listen, learn, and adapt as appropriate,” he said.

“Simultaneity” here means that Random House’s titles are available to libraries on the same date the retail edition is put on sale. It is not referring to simultaneous, multiple user access. The model remains one book, one user.

The reader can see the entirety of the Random House spokesperson's statement at the end of the Digital Shift article linked above.

To return to the boycott. The LION boycott was voted unanimously by its members on March 20, and communicated to Random House by LION president Richard Conroy. This boycott follows a similar boycott by a consortium of public libraries in Nova Scotia the South Shore Public Libraries, which voted to boycott purchases of new e-books from Random House by April 3, when this article ran in the The Chronicle Herald News. I think the issue is nicely put by the chief librarian Troy Myers:

"I don’t want to pick a fight with them, but their pricing’s unfair and I think they need to change it," chief librarian Troy Myers said Monday. (snip)"It’s public money we’re talking about here, and for us as a board to be good stewards of that money, we can’t justify paying these prices,"

(snip)
Library board member Alan Wilson ... fully supports the boycott, saying it's important to take an early public stand.

"If this is a trend and not a single publisher, it’s something to be very concerned about," Wilson said.

"It’s a question of equity and fairness," he said, for both the authors and readers, and the publisher should have discussed the issues with the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Canadian Publisher’s Council.

"It seems ill-considered, it seems ill-timed and unilateral.""

I was quite surprised that these 2 groups were coming out as consortia, organizing a boycott against a publisher because of a pricing issue. Because, you know, we've always been told by our professional organization that if we acted as an organized group of librarians to act against a publisher on any issue of pricing, for instance, or other consumer issue, for instance, we might be accused of ...

ANTITRUST VIOLATION

That we, the consumers would somehow be organizing as a trust or bloc to somehow illegally manipulate pricing.


And that's why we, as AALL members, for instance, are supposed to sign some sort of agreement before we go on the AALL lists, right? That we won't discuss

THINGS that might violate ANTITRUST

or wait...

is that really just about

making some really big publishers

UNCOMFORTABLE?

Holding Back the Tide of E-books

I love my Kindle. Before my recent trip to Spain, I loaded it up with classics I had been meaning to read for years--all for free. I didn't have to lug books around in my luggage, and the Kindle is small and light enough that I could carry it in my purse; I was never without reading material, a big deal for me. A bonus was that I was able to check my email on it; the Kindle wasn't designed as an email reader, but it worked and saved me from having to hang out in sketchy Internet cafes and pay to check my email. You haven't lived until you've been the only woman (and the only person over twenty-five) in an Internet cafe deep in the bowels of Tunisia, but that's another story. Actually, the Kindle works well enough to read email, but it's not particularly well suited to sending email messages. It can be done, but it's awkward.

This background explains my bewilderment when I came across an article in which "free software guru" and provocateur Richard Stallman is quoted as saying that "e-books are 'a step backward from printed books.'" He makes his case in a one-page comparison between printed books and Amazon e-books (he calls them "fairly typical"). With printed books, you buy them anonymously; after that, you own them without any restrictions on reproducing them (except, of course, those imposed by copyright law), you can lend them, you don't need proprietary technology to read them, and no one can take them away from you. With e-books, however, the "purchase" is not anonymous. Your use is governed by a restrictive license, and you can lend the book only in the most limited sense. Proprietary technology is required to read the e-book, and DRM prevents copying. Vendors can "remotely delete the ebook using a back door. It used this back door in 2009 to delete thousands of copies of George Orwell's 1984."

Stallman proposes that we "reject ebooks that deny our freedom. The ebooks companies say denying our traditional freedoms is necessary to continue to pay authors." In response, Stallman puts forth two ways in which we could compensate authors while legalizing sharing of intellectual property: 1.) we could "distribute tax funds to authors based on the cube root of each author's popularity"; or 2.) we could "design players so users can send authors anonymous voluntary payments." How realistic are these proposals? The current anti-tax, anti-big-government political climate would seem to argue against use of tax funds to compensate authors. And it's naive to think that authors could make a living from voluntary payments. I agree with Stallman that e-books are more restrictive than they need to be, but I don't think his arguments against e-books are going to resonate with most consumers. In fact, the popularity of e-books is growing. E-book sales totaled $164.1 million in January-February 2011, an increase of almost 170 percent compared to the same months in 2010. Stallman's campaign against e-books will probably be as successful as King Canute's attempts to hold back the tide, as shown in the illustration accompanying this post.

More on e-books

E-Books Summit: There is an e-books library summit coming up September 29, 2010! Co-sponsored by Library Journal and School Library Journal, it is aimed at Public Libraries, School Libraries and yes, Academic Libraries, too. It is a Virtual Conference which runs 10 AM - 6 PM EDT, with archives available October 1 - December 31, 2010.

Keynote speakers include Ray Kurzweil, David Lankes, and Kevin Kelly. OOTJ readers may recognize Kurzweil as the developer of the Kurzweil reader and the long-awaited (still waiting, Ray!) Blio free e-reader platform that will have such mongo read-aloud features because he works closely with the vision-impaired community. And OOTJ readers who were at AALL in Denver in July, 2010 may recognize David Lankes as the keynote speaker there, who gave a very high-energy talk to us (it's mentioned on the link page shown here). OOTJ readers who also read Wired will recognize Kevin Kelly's name from that context.

On a related note, http://ecogeek.org/ blog has a very nice analysis of the Kindle and its environmental impact. You have to replace more than 20 NEW books with a Kindle to balance the environmental impact of the heavy metals and plastics and energy of its manufacture, and power for its maintenance.

Developing Technology: How print shaped publishing

The Boston Globe Ideas section today had a wonderful interview with author Andrew Pettegree, about his book The Book in the Renaissance. Written by Tom Scocca, the Q&A style article discusses with Professor Pettegree his research about the birth of publishing, and what it reveals about our misperceptions of the earliest days of printing. When we think of early print, we always think of the Gutenberg Bible. This is the iconic representation of the early movable print product. But it is a huge misperception. Most printers were pouring out disposable little tracts, announcements from the town council, schoolbooks, sermons and, if they were lucky, reams of indulgences. The church at that time sold indulgences, and what they handed over to the layperson was a sheet of paper, printed, that stated what sins were forgiven. The lucky printer who got an order, could print multiple copies of the same single sheet, composed once, and get paid for it multiple times by an official institution.

According to Pettegree, the problem that printers faced was that the public was not used to being offered items to buy that they had not ordered. They had never had bookstores or catalogs. Up to that time, if a person wanted a book, they ordered it made. So when books became easier to make, printers struggled over how and what to offer to the public. They consulted with the leading scholars of the day, and offered the suggested classics. And had a resounding dud. They tried offering the leading medical texts. And again, had very little interest. They did better with sermons. These were smaller books, and did not cost so much. The items that were widely produced and that kept the successful printers in business turned out to be ephemeral, small print jobs like the announcements from town councils, school books that children did not want to keep, and indulgences. Most often, they were ordered by government or the church or another institution, so the printer got paid for a large run. These things are not beautiful, and were also not saved very often. So they are not what scholars today see in museums and libraries. We see and think of the rare and exotic Gutenberg Bible, which Pettegree tells us cost half as much as a house to buy when it was printed, and nearly bankrupted Gutenberg to produce. But this was the rare exception to the rule. Most printing was small, ephemeral and much more pedestrian work.

So, the article was interesting, not just for the history of printing, but because it parallels our own period, where we are watching a new technology and the struggles of society and commerce to make sense of it. We are trying to see how e-books and the platforms for them will fit into our lives, and what their future will be. We are trying to see what the economic sense of them will be and should be. And this turns out to be how printing had to shake out, as well. Who knew?

The decoration is courtesy of St. Catherine of Siena Virtual College, and is a print showing Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press.

Google to Sell Digital Books

Google has announced that it will start selling digital copies of books this summer, according to an article in the Telegraph. What makes this news significant is that these digital editions will not be tied to individual devices; rather, they will be available wherever and however a user accesses his Google account. As the Telegraph points out, this approach "will put the search giant in direct competition with established digital book retailers such as Amazon's Kindle Store and Apple's iBook Store." It also has a potential democratizing effect as users won't have to purchase expensive dedicated devices.

Kindle Review

A cogent review of the Kindle reader was published in today's Inside Higher Education. Written by Alex Golub, who teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the review discusses whether Kindle is appropriate for use by academics. He concludes that Kindle's current design is best suited to pleasure reading and not to reading of academic texts--"the Kindle makes moving back and forth between endnotes, body text, and bibliographic material a tremendous pain--a key concern for scholars who read by moving through the main text of a book and its scholarly apparatus simultaneously." It is also difficult, if not impossible, to mark up the text on the Kindle, something that many academics do while reading print texts. Golub concludes that Kindle and its competitors "are not ready for prime time yet, [but] they are stil great places to outsource our pleasure reading and reference libraries. And soon they might be good for even more." I like the tone of this review--it is evenhanded and balanced.

Competition for Kindle?

PCWorld has published an article touting Barnes & Noble's new Nook e-reader, which the author, David Coursey, feels will "convince e-book skeptics that this is the time to start moving from Gutenberg to gigabytes." Coursey lists the features he thinks will make the Nook a hit: color multi-touch screen; ease of purchasing e-books from the ubiquitous Barnes & Noble; openness to third-party applications; the ability to "loan" e-books to other Nook users and to users of other electronic devices. Is the price--$259--too high? Coursey thinks so, but believes the price will drop in the coming year. Be sure to check out PCWorld's tour of the Nook. As for me, I'll check it out the next time I'm in Barnes & Noble.

New Version of Kindle

Inside Higher Ed reports today on the new version of the Kindle reader that is "specifically designed to be friendlier to books and newspapers than other digital devices are." The new Kindle is larger and PDF enabled, making it more textbook friendly. Amazon is partnering with three textbook publishers (Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley) and six colleges (Pace University [at whose downtown campus the announcement was made], Reed College, Princeton University, University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, Arizona State University, and Case Western Reserve University) with the goal of incorporating Kindle into their curricula "in pilot experiments designed to test how students use e-textbooks and whether using them improves learning (or not)." I am affiliated with Pace Law School, and have to confess that I didn't know about this initiative until I read about it in Inside Higher Ed. Suffice it to say that the Law School isn't involved with the pilot, at least so far as I know. Here is a recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the new Kindle reader that expresses skepticism that students will be take to it as a substitute for traditional print textbooks.

I certainly would have liked to have had e-textbooks in law school. I grew so tired of carrying around heavy casebooks that I began cutting them up and bringing to school only those sections I needed for each day's classes. I was a librarian before I went to law school, and the librarian in me hated cutting apart books. Frankly, I still don't understand what authors need publishers for anymore except marketing. If authors have access to a server, there is no practical reason why a text cannot be made available to readers either for free or for a fee. Students would have access to texts on their laptops and wouldn't need a Kindle device as well.