The android tablet reveals the crown gem of ebooks

It had been a while since I had requested anything from Netgalley -- which is the most brilliant concept and I can only day I am green that I did not think of it myself! -- but I noticed last week that none of the last spate of electronic ARCs I asked for seemed to have the option to send the file to my Kindle. Someone in the twittersphere suggested it would return soon.

The 60-day clock (another innovation, that) was ticking! So, to read Lucy Kellaway's  British potboiler In Office Hours and then A Girl's Guide to Homelessness, Briana Karp's memoir derived from her blog, I pulled out the Pandigital Novel, the Android reader I bought last summer from Bed, Bath & Beyond. It was $149, I have since seen it advertised for $99, and if the $99 Kindle rumors are to be believed, I think  $50 ereader is possible by fall. I had not used it since September though, upon retrospect, the touchpad wasn't as bad as I'd remembered, I couldn't use it for checking Twitter as I kept inadvertently re-tweeting. And the Adobe Digital Editions software is so much clunkier than the consumer-oriented functionality of the Kindle! And the wires! I despair of those. But it is great for the Overdrive books from the public library...

Meanwhile, reading In Office Hours (in its epub format) was terrific. The font was sufficient, the cover art maintained. A Girls' Guide, which was pdf, was clunkier, because the spacing between lines varied wildly at the "large" font size,  and the margin symbols transformed into date stamps. Meanwhile, I couldn't read either Everything I Was or Plan B on the little tablet, because they crashed the Adobe software. They both have graphics-heavy front matter, but I can't see why that would be happening...

Then I found the crow jewel of ebooks, something that takes it to an entirely different realm. Something that threatens to be so democratizing as to evoke Gutenberg -- a gorgeous picture book on Preservation Hall done by LSU Press. With layouts that looked almost optimized for the tablet, the integrity of the text was such that you could see the effect that its influence would have on any reader, something I hadn't seen done with a purely electronic work. This doesn't do it justice:

I want some more of these...

In other events, my second generation Kindle is still waiting for a software update for pagination...

Is Amazon the next Apple?

Early this week, the biblioblogosphere was buzzing about pagination coming to Kindle. A tool that might make the ubiquitous ereader useful for scholarship!  As soon as I saw that the software update was available, I logged in, only to find the software update wasn't yet available for my second gen Kindle.

Now, that does suggest it will work well with old versions in the future. But it's ghettoization based on hardware version. But it reminds me of inherent limitations tag-teamed by hardware and software at Apple, which might be close to ending support for its original iPods. Speaking of which, these drag-and-drop binaries to update? Strike me as very vintage Apple-y.

In a related note, in my recommendations (part of the user experience which Amazon is SO GOOD at), I began to see "enhanced" versions of ebooks I've already bought. Decoded with enriched with an hour and a half of video? Now, that's a way to sell both the print AND paper products. But again, check your hardware.

Maybe it would work on Kindle for the iPad, but I can't get mine to connect to the Internet, my 3G data plan with AT&T held hostage until I upgrade to Snow Leopard and the wifi not playing along right now, either. I had discovered Kindle was supporting color for its iPad version last month:

(which I had to take a picture of, with iPhone, since I could not get either network mechanism on the iPad to output a screenshot. Maybe you can tell how thrilled I am with that piece of hardware.)

Meanwhile, harbingers of an Apple/Amazon schism indicate Apple wants a share of Amazon's profit for those in-app Kindle reads. So what's the point of building in (and flogging) functionality your proprietary hardware doesn't yet support? Just part of this weird, morphing ebook landscape.

Things I can't do

This is not a post about personal shortcomings, but rather one about institutional ones. I have become accutely aware of the amount of time I spend everyday engaged in needlessly repetitive tasks. Telling students the name of the library's printer, or walking over to the computer to help them choose the printer is perhaps the biggest time-suck. And that is necessitated because I cannot set a default printer for all our users.

In the same way, I cannot set the library homepage to the OPAC or our excellent state-funded databases. Instead, when our students open the browser, there are immediately confronted with the blocking screen from our district's web filter. The MSN site, because of its social aspects, is out-of-bounds for students, but they are constantly re-directed there since it is delivered with the machine.

I was reminded of how innured to all of this I have become over the weekend at Educon 2.3. I was admiring some of the great digital storytelling tools like MixBook and Scrapblog that the incredible Joyce Valenza uses with her students, but knew immediately that the requisite plug-ins would be a prohibitve issue. I cannot update anything, and though our district does push some updates out, sometimes these machines don't have enough disk space to load those. Because I cannot defrag the disks, or delete the temp files, or free up the space occupied by the profiles of the hundreds of students, many of them long graduated, who ever logged into that machine.

So I came back from SLA frustrated, and not just because all of our students don't have the same sort of supportive learning environment, but because there are so many barriers to the tools they need to be even minimally successful.

Getting ready to learn

I am so excited to be at Educon, at the Science Leadership Academy, one of those fantastic student-centered schools which have actually altered the trajectory of my professional life. But I arrived after days spent with an eye on the weather (Philadelphia canceled school for the second day in a row), a sleepless night broken by a 4:00 alarm & a 5:30 flight, minus the two cups of tea on which I have become quite dependent, and after an undignified spill on a spot of ice...but my point is, I wasn't ready to learn. Some of the smartest teachers I know are gathered here, and without a Starbucks stop (and a good look at the back of my favorite coat, now ever so slightly soiled by water and salt), I wasn't up for it...

It makes me come back to school readiness. And not just daily readiness, but preparation for learning, an environment conducive to thought and growth... I keep thinking about Stephen Krashen, and PISA scores.

Give them what they want

I recently got into a conversation with a friend who doesn't get conference-going. It's not integral to her profession, she says. As I was stumbling to defend my own professional development, I mentioned one of my favorite events at both Midwinter and ALA Annual, YALSA's teen feedback session for the Best Fiction for Young Adults selection committee. It is the best collection development advice I encounter outside my own student readers.

At BBFA, teens from local library teen advisory boards have access to new titles and ARCs and contribute their thoughts as readers as the committee members move through the list of hundreds of recent titles. The only downside is that the teens inevitably make me homesick for my students.


Some of my recent favorites made the Best Fiction for Young Adults list this year, including Mitali Perkins' Bamboo People, Margaret McMullan's Sources of Light and Numbers by Rachel Ward. Unlike the other two, Numbers was mentioned in the feedback session. The young woman said she didn't like the ending -- a complicated observation when the unavoidability things fuels the entire plot. I didn't understand how she could want something so antithetical. It reminded me of one of my students, who always requests romance, but ones where there is only one boyfriend. The idea of having rivals seems abhorrent to this girl. In the same way, the idea of a less-than-happy-ending ruined the whole reading experience for the BFYA teen.

The Martin Luther King holiday was the last day I will have off for a while, and I reached for the sequel, The Chaos, because I wanted something escapist. And it was terrific, it's 2027 and Jem's son Adam is seeing patterns in the numbers (which presage the death of those who meets) just as his mother had before the London Eye terror attack. Chicken House imports such consistently high products, I enjoy all of them. (And I want everything I read from here on out to have genre tags for action/adventure AND love stories/romance AND science fiction.)  But strange Ward chooses to subvert the premise of the first reality she crafted. And if the numbers are mutable? Where did that leave Jem and Spider in the first volume? If The Chaos would satisfy that reader's complaints, where does it leave its fundamental concept?