Jason T Bedell » E-Books

Kindle’s New Lending Feature: A Major Disappointment

Jason Bedell — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:29:16 +0000

Without much fanfare, Amazon has started to allow lending of Kindle books. As someone published in the Kindle store, I was notified by email this morning. Amazon had the opportunity to do something innovative but they chose to cripple this new feature in the same was that Barnes & Noble did with the Nook.

When the Nook was originally announced, there was a lot of fanfare. One of the main attractions at the time was its ability to lend books. This really excited me as I was a school librarian at the time. (I wrote more about this topic in E-book Readers in the School Library as well as E-books: How Should Schools Embrace the New Technology.)

Here are the main limitations:

You can only lend a book once.
You can only lend a book for 14 days.
Publishers have the option of not allowing you to lend their book.

These restrictions make this an almost useless feature for most people and particularly schools. It is better than not being able to lend at all, but not by much.

Furthermore, Amazon has decided to coerce publishers. There are two royalty brackets for Kindle publishers 35% and 70%. The 70% royalty has always had more conditions, such as pricing the book between $2.99 and $9.99 so customers have a monetary reason to choose e-books over physical books. Now, to keep the 70% royalty you must enable the sharing option.

For the record, I have no problem with sharing and would have enabled it on my book anyway, but I am never a fan of coercion. In addition, all of the blame cannot rest with Amazon or even Barnes & Noble, the company that pioneered these inane restrictions. The publishing company is terrified at the moment and requires DRM protection on everything and, while I have no direct supporting research, their prior actions suggest that they would balk at an unlimited lending feature. Here’s the problem, though. When I buy a physical movie, CD, or book, I lend it to whoever I want for however long I want. Sometimes, I even give them away. If I buy a digital product, I should still be the owner of that product and be able to with it as I will.

I would be curious to hear your opinion as the overall tenor of the discussions I am seeing on blogs and Twitter is fairly positive. Am I missing the mark here?

Here is the email from Amazon explaining the new feature. As it was sent to millions, I feel no qualms about reproducing it below.

Dear Publisher,

We are excited to announce Kindle book lending (http://www.amazon.com/kindle-lending). The Kindle Book Lending feature allows users to lend digital books they have purchased through the Kindle Store to their friends and family. Each book may be lent once for a duration of 14 days and will not be readable by the lender during the loan period.

All DTP titles are enrolled in lending by default. For titles in the 35% royalty option, you may choose to opt out of lending by deselecting the checkbox under “Kindle Book Lending,” in the “Rights and Pricing” section of the title upload/edit process. You may not choose to opt out a title if it is included in the lending program of another sales or distribution channel. For more details, see section 5.2.2 of the Term and Conditions.

For more info on how Kindle Book Lending works, see our FAQ here: http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?externalID=581

Sincerely,
Amazon Digital Text Platform

E-Books: How Should Schools Embrace the New Technology?

Jason Bedell — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:12:27 +0000

I just finished reading my first full-length e-book last night. As a former librarian, that may be surprising. Unfortunately, my proposal to pilot an e-book program while I was a librarian was turned down. Not having had a Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony Reader, or other reader, I really had not had the chance previously to try them myself.

I was often approached by publishing companies wanting to push proprietary e-books that can only be read on the computer, but I always turned them down as I find reading on the computer for extended periods of time to be a less than pleasant experience. I also had tried to read a Kindle book on the BlackBerry, but that was a fruitless experience for someone with my eyesight.

Those conditions are still true. However, I recently acquired an Android phone with a 4.3 inch screen, so I wanted to give it another try. I read a fiction book using the Amazon Kindle app for Android. I have also downloaded the Nook and Google Books apps, but have not extensively tried them yet. Here are some of my first impressions:

The experience was surprisingly pleasant. Once I adjusted the settings so that it was white text on a black screen, lowered the brightness, and made the font size as big as possible, it was an enjoyable experience without much eye strain or fatigue.
It is much easier to pick up and read a book for a few short minutes on a cell phone than on an actual book. Convenience does sometimes come at the expense of depth though.
I love the highlighting, annotation, and search features.
It is harder to really become invested in a book. For me, part of this stems from the fact that it is not really yours. You bought it, but Amazon can remove it from your library if they want. Annotating on a screen is not the same as highlighting, writing, or folding pages in a physical books. When someone really loves a book, it is evident by the wear and tear on the book. In some ways, e-books are less personal experiences than physical books.
Browsing a digital bookshelf is fun, but it cannot replace walking around the stacks of a book store or a library for me.
Kindle does not support page numbers. This is a major oversight as it makes it extremely difficult to do proper citations. This makes the format harder for education to support, unless MLA, APA, Chicago, and other citation bodies change to allow citing by Kindle’s “location,” which is not likely.
Publishers really need to step up their formatting. I have published one Kindle book without any training. The formatting was not ideal. I knew that and it is reflected in the $2.99 price tag. Since then, I have been studying Kindle formatting in depth in preparation for a big project in the spring. I may even start to offer Kindle conversion services as part of my company. In my opinion, after studying the finer details of what you can change and what you cannot on a Kindle, there were several instances of poor formatting choices throughout the book which is not acceptable from a multi-million dollar publisher.

Would I read another Kindle book? Absolutely. In fact, I have already ordered one and as well as a book for the Barnes and Noble Nook platform to compare.

Would I recommend that school libraries go completely digital? Not at all. There are still some shortcomings of the platforms, such as the lack of page numbers for citations and poor formatting of many texts, particularly the free texts. Beyond that, it would keep some students from learning to love reading. It really is a different experience; not necessarily better or worse. We owe it to our students to provide both. There are also licensing issues to work out in all of the major ebook stores, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

Would I recommend that school libraries factor e-books, both hardware and the books themselves, into their budget? Definitely. As a school librarian, one of the chief responsibilities is helping foster a love of reading in students. Every student is going to have different needs and interests. It is the same reason I introduced an anime section when other school libraries in the city were shunning anime as not being literary enough; there were students with an interest and it was what got them reading and coming to the library regularly. Furthermore, the searching (both in-text and on Wikipedia and an online dictionary) and annotating features do make e-books an excellent research tool.

All signs indicate that e-books are just going to continue to become a larger market. It is why technology giants Apple and Google have both jumped into the business in the last year. I feel that the industry has a lot of maturing to do in terms of removing DRM (Digital rights management that is designed to prevent theft. The music industry did this for years until they realized it was futile and bad for customers. An example was only being able to play a song you purchased in iTunes on 5 computers.) and moving towards standardization as opposed to every company having a new format or type of DRM. Just as the music industry spent many years sorting through growing pains as it adjusted to a changing landscape, so will the publishing industry. In 5-10 years, I expect the horizon to be quite different from it is at the moment. Having said that, schools would do well to stay current with their offerings instead of behind the times, as is so often the case.

E-book Readers in the School Library?

Jason Bedell — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:46:29 +0000

There has been a lot of buzz about the Nook, a new e-book reader from Barnes and Noble. Whether or not it can compete with Amazon’s Kindle or even Sony’s offerings is not the subject of this post. Rather, I would like to explore the advantages and disadvantages of e-readers in school and the specific advantages that the Nook appears to have.

The Nook

First, if you are a consistent reader of this blog, you are aware that I am a devoted advocate of open-source technology. The Nook’s user interface is built on top of a foundation of Android, an open-source operating system that is developed by Google. Though it was originally intended for smartphones, Android has been ported to many other devices for a variety of uses. The fact that it is built on open-source technology is a good thing as a general rule, but it also nearly ensures that the community of users will develop other applications, most likely a web browser, that can be used the Nook. It should be noted that Barnes and Noble’s specific modifications to Android are not, to my knowledge, open-source, but they are going to release a software development kit to help developers make official applications for it.

I am a devoted techie as well as a librarian. I love the smell and feel of old books, especially if they don’t have any mold built up. I am just as comfortable reading Shakespeare or php. In my office bookshelf, I have close to 400 titles and have thrown out, donated, or given away at least twice as many this year. Let me be perfectly clear here as I don’t want this to be misconstrued. E-books will never completely replace physical books for me personally and that will not happen in this school district anytime in the near future.

I do think, however, the e-books have a place. Whether that place ends up being on dedicated readers or on ubiquitous software that allows you to read the books on computers, tablets, smartphones, MIDs, and any other new media, I cannot say for sure. The library does have 30 iPod Touch that could theoretically act as e-readers, but I don’t want to limit them to just that. I also am apparently not allowed to let students check out any device at the current time that has unrestricted wireless internet access on it. (Although I am working to change that so students can check out laptops and eventually iPods, I have been overruled for the present time.)

I am developing a proposal to buy 3 e-readers, specifically the Nook for reasons that are explained below. For about $1,000, which I should have left in my opening budget, I can get 3 of the readers and about 20 books at $9.99 apiece. I would like to see how they are received by students, most likely by introducing them first to my group of regulars (probably close to 50 students), then to the general student population. After collection formative (through conversations) and quantitative (through surveys and other tools) data on the experience, I can then try to find grant money to buy more if all goes well.

There are a few features that I like specifically about the Nook. First, the ability to share is crucial. With the Nook, if I have a book on my device, I can share it for 14 days with another Nook, with an iPod Touch or Blackberry running the Barnes and Noble software, or with a computer. I am essentially buying the content. So no matter how many Nooks I buy, a student with a Nook can essentially check out a copy 1 at a time. This is similar to how it works with real books and, conveniently, our checkout period is 14 days. Whereas with the Kindle, or some other readers, if I have 30 devices, I need 30 copies of the book. This was really the tipping point for me to get into the e-reader market. There is also a wireless signal in addition to free 3G; the Kindle only has 3G and I believe that they have started charging for it. Since we have a wireless overlay in the school, wifi is very helpful. The capacitive touch screen at the bottom of the device also looks great for browsing books and would be much easier than a traditional e-ink screen. The nook allows for SD care memory expansion, so I can put a lot more content on it. In addition, I can download any book in the ePub format as well as any document in PDF format, which is near ubiquitous. This allows us to get most of the classics free through Google Books.

Without sounding hateful, I will not ever buy a Kindle. I am not a fan of the design. While I appreciate function over form, it is not at all appealing to look at and there is no where that I can go to try one before I buy it. In addition, Amazon showed their true colors when they wirelessly deleted George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from a large number of users’ Kindles. Even after apologizing for their handling of the situation, they still made it expressly clear in statements and fine print that they reserve the right to do this again.

If you have any ideas or suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

Update 10/23

I just found how limited the sharing feature on the Nook will be. This really potentially ruins the device for me as a librarian. Publishers can opt out of sharing and even when they don’t, sharing is only allowed once per book, ever. I am still considering thanks to the abundance of free classic ebooks, but this is disappointing.