Kindle and Reading

I've got a Kindle, but use it mostly when I'm travelling so that I can have access to reading material without having to haul around lots of books in my suitcase.  I hate running out of books. During more than one foreign vacation, I have been forced to track down bookstores that stock English-language titles and then pay exorbitant prices for them.  With the Kindle, this problem goes away.  Most of what I read on my Kindle is fiction, which is why I was interested to learn that researchers have found that readers using the Kindle were "'significantly' worse than paperback readers at recalling when events occurred in a mystery story."  This conclusion comes from a recent study of fifty readers who read the same short story (half on a Kindle and half on print) that was reported in The Guardian.  The readers were tested on "aspects of the story including objects, characters and setting," and the "'Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure.'"  The researchers can't explain their findings, but speculate that it has something to do with the tactile quality of paper and the physical unfolding of the book as the reader progresses through the story.  "Perhaps this somehow aids the reader, providing more fixity and solidity to the reader's sense of unfolding and progress of the text, and hence the story."  The study doesn't address the issue of reading nonfiction works on a Kindle, but the results might carry over--the same researcher has found that "'students who read texts in print scored significantly better on the reading comprehension test than students who read the text digitally.'"  More research is being conducted to determine which devices (print, iPad, Kindle) are suitable for which types of content, and this research should help educators deal with the impact of digitization on learning.         

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.

E-book Market Shake-up as Justice Pursues Anti-Trust

The New York Times reports that the Justice Department has filed suit against Apple and six publishers of e-books on anti-trust grounds that they colluded to set pricing. Attorney General Eric Holder alleges that the group met at expensive restaurants and "double deleted" e-mails in an attempt to hide their efforts to fight back against Amazon.com's low pricing of e-books. Led by former Apple boss Steve Jobs, they agreed to set their e-book prices for the iPad between about $12.99 and $14.99 compared with the typical $9.99 Amazon e-book Kindle price. Using the popularity of the iPad, the group hoped to fight back against the low prices driven by Kindle's popularity and Amazon's pricing.

The complaint alleges that the collusion caused

“consumers to pay tens of millions of dollars more for e-books than they otherwise would have paid.”

Three publishers that were investigated, the Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins, have already agreed to a settlement that will most likely overturn their pricing model. Macmillan and Penguin Group USA, which were also named in the suit, have not settled. ... The publishers who have settled are required to end their e-book contracts with Apple and any other retailer with a “most favored nation clause,” which says that no other retailer can sell e-books for a lower price. For two years, the publishers are also prohibited from restricting any retailer’s ability to discount e-books.

Amazon appears poised to lower the prices for its e-books even further, which should be further pressure on the remaining competitors in the marketplace. There is a companion article in the Times about this, and concerns by some business analysts that Justice may be inadvertently setting up Amazon as a true monopoly in the e-book market.

Going Paperless in the UK

From the United Kingdom comes this story about a plan "to give jurors a basic 89 pound Kindle in a bid to cut down on paperwork." The idea behind the plan is to facilitate jurors' review of evidence, with the ultimate goal of creating a "paperless" court system in the United Kingdom.

As of next April courtrooms across the UK are set to "go digital" and ditch traditional paper files and case bundles ...

The plan will be to use existing court computers and secure email systems to allow the prosectuion to present its case on a giant screen from a laptop which can be seen by the judge and jurors.

"By April 2012, the aim is to have all criminal justice system agencies transferring information digitally.

This is part of work across the criminal justice system to provide a simpler, swifter and more transparent service that meets the needs of victims and the public."

There will be a "mock trial" later in December to test prosecutors' use of "tablet devices"--Kindles aren't mentioned--to communicate with police and to retrieve evidence. When the plan goes live, jurors will not get fully loaded Kindles that would allow them to access the Internet; rather, they will be issued basic units.

This approach might meet the concerns of critics of the British Kindle initiative. The first concern is that although issued Kindles for trial-related purposes, jurors might try to download novels or surf the Internet. Limited or no access to the Internet through a basic Kindle would answer this objection.

The second concern smacks of ageism. Some critics have said "that some members of a jury may not be up to speed with the technology," and couldn't be expected to learn how to use a Kindle to review evidence. A lot of training will be required for jurors in the 60-to-69 age group, and this will have costs for the court system. (In England, people over the age of 70 do not serve on juries.) Frankly, the notion that once you celebrate your sixtieth birthday, you can't be expected to use technology is ridiculous. How hard is it to use a Kindle?

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.

Back from Spain

I just returned from a three-week trip to northern Spain (Barcelona, Bilbao, Leon, Burgos, Astorga, Santiago de Compostela, La Coruna) and then to Madrid. Barcelona, of course, is famous for its collection of buildings designed by Antoni Gaudi, and these did not disappoint. In Bilbao, we visited the Guggenheim Museum with its renowned building; the building is eyecatching to be sure, but I was underwhelmed by the collection of art it contained--the reaction of a jaded New Yorker? Leon and Burgos are famous for their cathedrals, and the cathedral in Leon is particularly noteworthy for its stained glass, which is simply spectacular. Santiago de Compostela is the home of another famed cathedral, not as ancient or beautiful as those in Leon and Burgos, but holding a special place in the heart of Roman Catholics because it contains the tomb of the apostle Saint James the Elder, the patron saint of Spain. Santiago de Compostela is also the endpoint for pilgrims on El Camino de Santiago, which runs through northern Spain. We had earlier encountered pilgrims in Leon and Burgos, which are also on the Camino. They are hard to miss because they carry walking staffs which are adorned with scallop shells, the traditional symbol of the pilgrimage. The illustration to this post is of a scallop shell like the ones we saw everywhere in Santiago in Compostela. The pilgrimage dates back to the Middle Ages and has become very popular among people of all ages and nationalities in the last decade or so. In La Coruna, we climbed the Tower of Hercules, originally a lighthouse built by the Romans, which afforded splendid views of the surrounding countryside and ocean. In Madrid, we spent a long day (ten hours) at the Prado, and didn't manage to make it through the whole collection. I had forgotten what a treasure trove of Old Masters it contains. We also visited a special exhibit at the Palacio Real of art from Poland, which contained two paintings I had never seen before except in illustrations--a glorious portrait by Rembrandt of a young girl who nearly jumped out of the picture frame at the viewer. The Rembrandt almost stole the show from the crown jewel of the exhibit--Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine. We lingered so long over this enigmatic painting, considered a Polish national treasure, that the guards practically had to throw us out. The rest of the exhibit is also well worth seeing.

We were last in Spain about thirty years ago, and so much has changed. What hasn't changed is the beauty of the countryside and the delectable food made from locally-grown vegetables and fruits. The tomatoes and oranges bear little resemblance to what we buy in our supermarkets back here. I'm going to have to make it a point to frequent farmers' markets this summer and liberate myself from supermarket produce.

The last time we were in Spain, we visited Madrid and southern Spain, and most people seemed to speak Castilian. In northern Spain, depending on where you travel, people speak Castilian, but also Catalan, Basque, and Galician. Catalan and Galician I could cope with, but Basque was completely impenetrable to me. I later learned that Basque predates the Romance languages, and is unrelated to any other European language. That explains my difficulty in understanding it. Something else that struck me was the number and variety of bookstores in Spain. At home, we are all aware that independent bookstores are dying off, and we are left with only a few large chains. This is not the case in Spain, where there may be several bookstores in one block. Although this is particularly true in university towns, it was also true in towns that did not have universities.

Speaking of bookstores, before the trip, I finally bought myself a Kindle and I think I'm in love. I loaded it up with some old favorites and some classics I hadn't read before, and I found it to be a tremendous convenience. At first I missed having a physical book, but I soon found that the format didn't actually make much of a difference in my reading experience. I hadn't brought a laptop with me, but I was able to use my Kindle for email. It works well for reading messages, but not so well for sending messages--not surprising as it is meant to be a reading device.

Blind & Visually Disabled Students Challenge Universities

The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a news story dated December 12, by Marc Parry, reports that as colleges and universities create more social media-based services and "hubs" for students, there is an increasing problem with visually disabled students lacking access. The developers of these sites simply don't think about making them accessible, the way that architects now routinely consider ramps and braille signage. But the problem is bigger than social sites' accessibility. E-textbooks often lack the metadata tags that are key for the screenreaders used by visually disabled readers. If an illustration does not have a caption explaining what the illustration, graph or image shows, the blind student cannot access that information. When schools mandate the use of Kindles they really need to be aware that these machines do not have decent readers built in, and blind users will HATE or be unable to use the machines to access e-books (depends on the version whether there is a voice at all -- visit this 2009 CNet review for a sample of the voice). When websites require mouse clicks to navigate, a vision-impaired user cannot access the site, because they cannot see to move the mouse around on the screen. They use a keyboard, and need a key substitute for the button click that the web designer imagines for the mouse. With a mouse-only design, visually impaired users have been locked out of the website.

These new developments are actually causing the visually disabled student to LOSE ground from the status of the visually disabled college student of 20 years ago, according to Daniel F. Goldstein, counsel to the National Federation for the Blind. Goldstein helped students file a discrimination complaint against Penn State because of campus technology blocking their access to the library catalog, department websites, and the course management software, which is apparently a nightmare.

The article does a nice job of hinting at the extreme difficulties which students and disabilities support offices alike run into with textbooks, for instance, and the long-time difficulties of trying to convince textbook publishers to do something to remedy the problem:

In the 1990s, he (Blind activist Darrell Shandrow, a senior currently at Arizona State, studying journalism) "virtually bombed out" his first two semesters of college and withdrew from most classes, largely because of a lack of textbooks in Braille or electronic format. Nearly two decades later, access to books remains a very thorny issue. Many publishers have "dragged their feet" making textbooks available in alternate formats, says Jack Trammell, director of disability-support services at Randolph-Macon College, in Virginia. That creates delays and leaves colleges scrambling to figure out alternative fixes, such as scanning books themselves.

Amazon's Kindle had the potential to avoid such problems. Unlike ink on paper, digital texts aren't inherently visual or aural, advocates argue, so they should be equally accessible to blind or sighted users. In fact, the Kindle did come with text-to-speech technology. But its menus were not accessible to blind users.

(snip) In June 2009, he (Shandrow) joined the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind in suing Arizona State to block it from deploying the Kindle. The groups also filed complaints about Kindle pilots at five other colleges.

The outcome was mixed. Since Mr. Shandrow was ineligible for the Kindle pilot, a judge dismissed him from the case for failing to identify "any clear policy by ASU that will in any way impact him." But then, in January, Arizona State agreed to settle the case. Denying any legal violation, the university said it would strive to use only accessible e-book readers for a two-year period. Similar agreements were soon reached between the Justice Department and other colleges identified by the advocates.

In Washington, meanwhile, federal authorities seized on the Kindle controversy to broadcast a sharp message to colleges nationwide: Requiring inaccessible e-readers may run afoul of the law. The warning came in a public letter released jointly by the Departments of Justice and Education. (here is a nice blog post that pulls together the full text of the letter with some excellent links & comments)

"It is unacceptable for universities to use emerging technology without insisting that this technology be accessible to all students," the government said.

(snip) Inaccessibility is a major issue for the movement to post educational content free on the Internet. Hundreds of colleges have spent tens of millions of dollars producing lecture videos, notes, syllabi, and other free online materials. But Hal Plotkin, a senior policy adviser in the Education Department, says he would be surprised if more than 10 percent of these open educational resources are fully accessible. That flaw has "dramatically" held back their deployment, says Mr. Plotkin, a former community-college trustee in California.

Public institutions "will not use these materials," Mr. Plotkin says, "because the lawsuits that would follow would be inevitable, and very costly."

(snip) There are hopeful signs. California State University has shown how powerful colleges can be when they make access a high priority. The nation's largest public-college system turns its size into influence by denying problem companies access to its market of 430,000 students. That helped push Apple, Google, and Blackboard to upgrade their products for the blind. (Here is a newsletter article from 2009 noting improvements from all those companies as well as IBM, Elluminate and Microsoft, that make technology more accessible for the disabled).

Blackboard got so much better that in March, the National Federation of the Blind lauded the company for "great improvement" in the latest release of its course-management software. Navigation is smoother, and so are the forms, allowing blind students to do things like submit assignments and participate in discussions. Blackboard even offers a self-paced course for professors to get guidance on building accessible classes.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is considering amending the ADA's regulations to specify that the Web, like a building, is covered by the law.

So, things move along, glacially, but they move. Prickly activists like Mr. Shandrow are the ones who make them move, along with supportive government officials who are willing to make change. We will see how much and how fast. If you are in a position of decision-making at your school, keep these factors in mind and perhaps you will save your institution from a law suit, and maybe even make them into the sort of change-maker that Cal State has become.

Kindle Experiment in New York

The New York Law Journal ran a first-page story today (unfortunately, I cannot link to it because it requires a subscription) about an experiment unfolding in New York's appellate courts. The Presiding Justice of the Appellate Division, Second Judicial Department, Gail Prudenti, purchased two Kindle DXs to be tested by the court's judges. Other digital reading devices are being tested as well. Justice Prudenti said that "The objective [of the pilot project] is to see if we can enhance the productivity of our judges and decrease printing." She is looking to the future, when there will be a "non-residential bench and the prospect of a paperless court."

Only six of the 22 judges on the panel are based in Brooklyn. The rest commute from chambers scattered from the east end of Long Island to the mid-Hudson valley, lugging thousands of pages of documents for each court session.

All of those documents can be scanned as PDF files into the Kindle DX ...

Two justices tried out the Kindles in November, and then turned them over to two other justices for testing. "So far, the device has earned mixed reviews." One common comment was that it is easier to refer back to paper documents than to the same documents on the Kindle. The justices liked not having to haul around large quantities of paper, and thought that use of the Kindle was environmentally responsible because it does cut down on paper. An ongoing concern is "security of court documents" because the "Kindle does not come with a password protection feature, and its contents would be easily accessible if the device was lost or stolen ..." However, security could be compromised with paper files if they are lost or stolen. Another potential drawback to the Kindle is that the "user is limited to viewing a document and cannot make alterations like writing notes in the margins." A practitioner, Jeffrey D. Osterman, of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, thinks that the Kindle could help individuals with impaired vision because the type size can be manipulated; also, the documents could be read aloud through a computer. It's too soon to tell if this pilot project is a total success, but it's worth watching.

A Visit to the Morgan

Yesterday, I visited the Morgan Library in New York City and spent a couple of pleasant hours viewing the exhibit on Jane Austen, my favorite author. The exhibit contained a number of treasures, such as the letter describing Jane's death written by Cassandra Austen to a niece. On display were a number of Jane's letters, including one written backwards (shades of Leonardo da Vinci) and another written in "cross hatching," a method used to save precious paper. I did not know this, but the Morgan has the world's largest collection of Jane's letters, most of which were destroyed after her death by Cassandra. The exhibit showcased a collection of first editions of the novels, and also displayed contemporary engravings that were in keeping with the themes of the exhibit. I always enjoy going into Mr. Morgan's study and seeing the three stunning paintings by Hans Memling, and into Mr. Morgan's library, with its sixteenth-century lindenwood statue of Saint Elizabeth holding a book and its Gutenberg Bible. The Morgan actually has three Gutenberg Bibles, only one of which, a copy printed on paper, is on display. There is another copy printed on paper, and a third printed on vellum. The legend that accompanied the Gutenberg Bible read that it was the "book that inaugurated a new era in the history of visual communication."

This is certainly true, and got me thinking about an article I had read in The New York Times last Sunday. The article, entitled "The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s," starts with a vignette about the author's two-year-old daughter who refers to his Kindle as "Daddy's book." And to her, of course, it is, because she will "know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone. She'll see the world a lot differently from her parents." The point of the article is that we will continue to have generation gaps caused by the rapid changes in technology, but they will not be like the generation gaps we've had in the past. Researchers "theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development." Professor Larry Rosen

has also drawn this distinction between what he calls the Net Generation, born in the 1980s, and the iGeneration, born in the '90s and this decade.

Now in their 20s, those in the Net Generation ... spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently. The iGeneration, conceivably their younger siblings--spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger network.

Dr. Rosen said that the newest generations, unlike their older peers, will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and won't have the patience for anything less.

"They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up ... They should be just like their older brothers and sisters, but they are not."

Two questions come immediately to mind: How will teachers meet the expectations of students accustomed to immediate feedback? And how in the heck are we going to keep up with the changes in technology?

Criticism of the Nook

Barnes & Noble's new electronic book reader, the Nook, is not ready for prime time. So says David Pogue in his product review in the The New York Times. The Nook is modeled after Amazon's Kindle reader, but falls short of the Kindle in several respects according to Pogue. One is the "color touch screen," which is "actually just a horizontal strip beneath the regular Kindle-style gray screen." Another is the touch screen, which is "balky and nonresponsive." Nook claims that it has over one million titles available, but many of them are "junky Google scans of free, obscure, pre-1923 out-of-copyright books, filled with typos." Nook books are more expensive than Kindle books. The built-in Wi-Fi doesn't work well, and the claim that you can loan Nook books to friends is not completely true. "You can't lend a book unless its publisher has O.K.'ed this feature. ... only half of its books are available for lending ... Furthermore, the book is gone from your own Nook during the loan period ... And each book can be lent only once, ever." Pogue reserves his most stinging criticism for "Nook's half-baked software," which he describes as being "slower than an anesthetized slug in winter." A very vivid image! He concludes that "the Nook is a mess, clearly rushed out the door in hopes of stealing some of the Kindle's holiday cheer." A number of fixes are in the works, but for now, the Nook remains an inferior product, at least in Pogue's opinion. I played with one at a Barnes and Noble in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago and found that the screen tended to be nonresponsive, even for the salesperson. I concluded that it would drive me crazy to try to read a book when it took three seconds to turn a page (Pogue cites the same figure) and I didn't buy it. While I was at the booth, I was the only customer; there didn't seem to be much interest in the Nook on the part of other customers, although the store was otherwise very busy.

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.

Nicholson Baker on Kindle

I would have been astonished if Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold and long-time library critic, had been a fan of Amazon's Kindle reader. Thus, his somewhat nasty article in the August 3 issue of The New Yorker reviewing the Kindle 2 e-book reader contained few surprises. Entitled "A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book?", Baker's piece dissects the Kindle and presents a catalog of its shortcomings, starting with its name, which is "cute and sinister at the same time." It strikes me the same way, as a matter of fact--whenever I hear the word "Kindle," I see libraries going up in flames in my mind's eye. Nicholson also dislikes the Kindle's screen, which he characterizes as being of a "greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray." Even the typeface is criticized by Baker, who says that "[d]ark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle." The typeface, Monotype Caecilia, was "grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words." Baker is unhappy with the currently limited catalog of titles available on Kindle, but acknowledges, however, that the number of books offered over Kindle will grow as time goes on. Baker doesn't discuss the recent controversy about 1984's removal from Kindle. He seems particularly bothered by Kindle's poor display of graphics. "Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don't fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don't work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. If you want to quote from a book you've bought, you have to quote by location range ..." There are problems with the display fading when the device is used outdoors. And he is outraged by the fact that when

[Y]ou buy a Kindle book[,] [y]ou buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon. ... [Y]ou can't read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an e-book reader that competes with the Kindle. ... Kindle books aren't transferrable. You can't give them away or lend them or sell them. You can't print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

I have no personal experience with the Kindle, but if Baker's observations about the quality of the display and of the graphics are correct, the design needs to be tweaked if the Kindle is going to gain widespread acceptance.

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.