Kindling

I spent an enjoyable lunch at Mamie's Cafe this week meeting with Rod (my boss), a number of faculty and a representative from Amazon who is looking into uses of the Kindle in higher education. We're one of the few schools that actually has tried this out: Rod has loaned one to everyone in his Comp Sci senior capstone course to read their various assignments on, and so Susie Kroll decided to come see how it's been working out.

We have a number of test Kindles laying around the college and I tested one myself for a few weeks a while back. My overall review of the machine (posted on Amazon) was not very favorable- in my opinion the machine has a number of technical flaws such as a small screen, poor control layout and poor battery life as well as being tied to DRM'd content that will simply vanish if the Kindle does. As a bibliophile, I have an extensive library at home, with books ranging from last week's paperback to 150-year-old textbooks, all of which are still quite usable. The technical limitations don't bother me too much- it's a first gen device that will be improved: that's just engineering. The DRM and content control issues, on the other hand, are far more serious.

To Susie's credit, she didn't try to shy away from this. It's a difficult position for Amazon to be in- they do make more money if you have to rebuy content in new formats, so she has to argue against her company's own interests if she pushes it. But it's also a demand from the copyright holders, and without them the Kindle goes nowhere quickly. Her comments that the Kindle is a major project at Amazon and isn't going away anytime soon ring a bit hollow on the same week Microsoft announced it's turning off the MSN Music license key servers. Somewhere along the line there's going to have to be a format you can get the content off the Kindle and put it somewhere safe or people are going to get burnt. This may not matter to many people, but for those of us who buy lots of books and keep them forever it's a killer.

So where could it help in academia? Beyond some pie-in-the-sky discussions of add ons like external video out and tablet-like support, there are some realistic options. Textbooks are big, heavy, expensive and honestly don't get used all that much. Why not put them on a Kindle- I know a lot of students would be happy to ditch 30 pounds of Zhumdahls and Campbell&Reeces for a single small device. But here the technical limitations of the Kindle come back to really kill this idea- the screen is too small, you can't do color illustrations, textbooks use lots of non-standard formatting (making them hard and expensive to convert) and the footnoting and indexing features of the Kindle are nonexistent. (It's a consumer device, after all) Perhaps the next gen?

The really interesting part of the discussion came when we began to discuss small-run content. College courses are notorious for requiring course packs, a few chapters of a dozen different books bundled together into one Frankenbook. These are annoying to create, since you have to clear each chapter with the publisher, pay fees, etc. Why not just have a "Create a reader" option on the Kindle website? Get the publishers to work out something flexible- if the book is $20, each chapter can be bought individually for $2 with all rights cleared. A professor could assemble a course reader in a few hours and get exactly what they want, all the tedious photocopying goes away, etc. Work out a deal with each college so that the student just goes to the Amazon website, clicks "My school", selects "Gettysburg College" and there are the list of all the course packs.

How about professor-generated content? Academics love to publish scholarly books, often with very small print runs: a few thousand perhaps. These aren't done for the money- one professor here comments he buys a case of beer every six months with the proceeds from his book. Instead, these are a critical piece of the academic reputation process, showing that you have the skills to do serious research in a field, and as such are essential for a professor in the humanities or social sciences to get tenure. The Kindle would be ideal for these in many ways- no need for a minimum print run since you can just make a copy when someone clicks "Buy", better exposure since anyone can get a copy of something there are interested in rather than having to go to a specialized academic library, etc. But will an ebook count towards tenure in the same way as a physical one? Until the answer is "yes", this idea is dead in the water, or perhaps we'll always have to have at least one small print run just so Joe Prof can hit his tenure committee over the head with his 600 page masterwork into the grooming habits of pre-Incan women.

There is a lot of promise here, but there's still a long way to go.