Skip to main content

Kindle goes to the Library

In a press release today Amazon.com has announced that it is working with Overdrive to create Kindle Library Lending. This will allow people with Kindles (or the Kindle program) to checkout books from over 11,000 local libraries in the US. This new addition fill in one of the gaps that many of us have noticed concerning ebook readers, that just about all of the other major devices were already public library compatible. One of the extra nice things about this though will be that the annotations will be available the next time you check out the book or buy your own copy. I'm very glad to see library content being made available. I think that the recent growth of Kindle purchases and of private lending clubs demonstrated that there is a market of people who want lending to be an ongoing part of their reading experience. Yes I love that any book that I buy though Amazon's Kindle service will always be available to me, but too I know that there are some books that I will read and never look at again, that is when I would rather library borrow than purchase.

Next, I think that more libraries themselves need to be investing in some ebook readers for their clients to check out, as soon there will be some content that will only be available though digital access.

Read the press release at: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1552678&highlight= 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Auto Summarization

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels.  I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support

Ebooks as Textbooks - Part 2 - Highlighting

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks. Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text.  These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs. Poor highlighting design - too much text has been highlighted.  The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking ( to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be effective in highlighting it should be a kind of  meta

Art Project - adding ebooks to art

I'm beginning a new project to update some classic art that involves books to incorporate ebooks. Here are the first two that I have gotten done so far: Jean-Hanore Fragonard's A Young Girl Reading (a Sony Ebook) John Singer Sargent - Simplon Pass Reading (a Nook Color), 1911