RodeWorks

The Christmas holiday is a great time to enjoy some peace and quite — time for reflection and for catching up on my reading.  I enjoyed Peter Pezzelli’s new book Italian Lessons, started Bill Bryson’s book Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (so far not as fun as some of his others), and a book on making your own electric car (too complex, too expensive, technology not quite ready for home use.) Magazine reading counts too, and on top of catching up on my back issues of Wired, I caught Steve Levy’s wonderful Newweek article (11/26/07) on Amazon’s new Kindle e-book device.

The bottom line is Levy is pretty much a fan of the device, although acknowledging that its still first generation and perhaps not quite at the price vs. features point for wide spread appeal.� I won’t summarize the article for you here, you can read it and draw your own conclusions.� I think this type of technology is the future of the book, and in the academic arena opens up really exciting possibilities for wider distribution of scholarly content.��Take away the costs of physical book production, distribution, inventory management and it should be possible to publish more books at a much lower price and still keep the slim profit/royalty margins for publishers and authors.�

As far as a device like the Kindle is concerned, I’ll accept that publishers�need to limit e-books to prevent copying passages into other documents, printing or sending on to others — its kind of a drag for me the reader, but fair.� In return I do want to ability to create my own annotated bookmarks — and those I can copy, print and, most importantly, share.� Those annotations are helpful to me — I can categorize them, search across them, organize them for my own work — and allow other readers to see my approach to various texts.� Now maybe my opinions don’t have wide spread appeal, but who wouldn’t want to see Jon Stewart’s annotation on Ann Coulter’s latest book?� In this case he could sell his annotations — its his work after all — but to really appreaciate them you’d also need to purchase the electronic copy of Coulter’s original work.� Then you’d get to see not just the annotation, but the annotations on top of the original passages.� In the classroom the professor’s annotations could accompany the assigned texts — and note that if the prices are now lower there is also the possibility of more varied texts being assigned.� Homework assignments could now include students annotating particular passages and then sharing those with their classmates.� This creates a much richer experience for online asynchronous discussion than the current discussion board approach.� And all of this delivered via a portable, always connected device.

Books ain’t going anywhere for a while, and the Kindle and its kin still have some ground to cover, but its getting closer.� And in the near future we will see these possibilities rapidly come available.� Something is always lost as older technologies fade (I still miss the LP record album covers) but there is much to gain from e-books as long as they allow this type of user participation.� Hopefully the old-school print world won’t make that same mistakes that the recording industry has.