Amazon Erasing Digital Books Should Come As No Surprise

Kindle users were angered when their "1984" and "Animal Farm" copies were deleted from their e-readers because of a copyright issue. I would have been pretty annoyed (or very pissed if I were the student who lost all his notes for his summer assignment with his copy) but not surprised. Appearance is not the biggest difference between physical books and ebooks. A digital format offers a vastly greater amount of control by those who control its distribution than an analog format. An ebook is data to Amazon. Amazon has created a data architecture whereby they can monitor and manipulate everything they sell to Kindle users, which is pretty brilliant, though I don't like buying into that level of control myself. It's the way they executed their solution to their copyright problem that caused such a public relations fiasco. If they had given customers a bit of warning, say, in an email the day before to explain the need for the refund, most people would have had no problem.

Fujitsu e-reader

Fujitsu just announced the release this fall of a bendable e-reader with a color display. According to them it's the first of its kind. In my view it's the next big step to the huge change that's going to sweep through the schools once we have a viable (affordable, dependable, and multi-platform) color e-paper technology. This one will set you back about $1,000. It sounds like a very adaptable medium as it will be capable of transferring data from a phone or PC wirelessly or with an SD card. The Fujitsu press release has a nice narrative imagining how this technology could change your daily activities, not to mention a nice photo of the bendable display:

"Imagine going to your local train station to commute to the office in the morning. Instead of large paper posters, the train time tables are shown on large electronic paper displays that wrap around the columns of the platform. Before getting on the train, you download the day's news from a vending machine and read it on your ultra-thin, film substrate-based e-newspaper. It's much like a traditional newspaper except that instead of throwing it away after reading it you simply update the content the next day."

I'll have to work on writing a similar narrative for the classroom.

E-Readers

I have a big problem with DRM, and I had little interest in any of the e-book readers--Kindle, Sony, and whatever others--because of that limitation, even with the chance to use an early version of this e-paper I'm so interested in. But this article by Wayne MacPhail makes it clear that you can use one of these without being chained to the DRM-loving companies by getting your content from the open source websites Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, and ManyBooks. I could almost get one of these knowing this, even though it's not the flexible piece of e-paper I really want to use. The other thing MacPhail points out is that they can read .pdf, .doc, .txt, and .rtf formats as well, which would be a great tool for me to read my class papers on the subway without printing out all that paper.

Construction e-paper?

A good article about new developments in e-paper. Editors Weblog takes a big-picture look at the role of paper in our lives and considers whether any form of e-paper could completely replace what has been one of the greatest inventions in the last 2000 years, citing its "tangibility, spatial flexibility, tailorability and manipulability." But the fact that paper is also disposable gives it uses that could never be replaced by an electronic medium. Without paper my daughter would have missed out on one of the greatest dimensions of her learning experience. The ability to fold, cut, tear, and throw away paper, as in construction paper, for example, provides the experience of hand-made projects that allows us to think in ways nothing else can. What would Frank Gehry have done without paper? Rather than replacing paper, it's more like an editorial in The Guardian puts it, that "books will have to welcome a new member to the family."

Good Idea for E-books

I had some ideas earlier about how e-paper could change education. A commenter to an article about the future of e-books describes a scenario that fills in some details about how it wold work--getting the curricular materials students need, that is. Everything distributed through a network to just those who need it, highly individualized. Read it here.

E-paper

I can imagine so many instructional situations in which some kind of electronic paper would be really useful. Just plug in a USB e-paper screen and pull up a tutorial beside your laptop while you follow its directions on your main screen; pull your e-paper scroll out of your pocket during a field trip in the park and jot down some notes around the picture of what you're identifying; plug several into an "e-paper hub" and load a document on all of them at once. I have students who don't want to refer to the tutorials I'm spending hours making for them because it's too hard or confusing for them to switch screens to do what it tells them to. Last week, a student said she couldn't work on her computer because her neighbor was watching the tutorial on her computer so she could follow the steps on her own. I could give them paper to avoid this difficulty, and sometimes I do, but the screen allows for a much richer multimedia experience.

E-paper will be in schools eventually, but it will take a while. Just today, Wacom and E Ink announced development of an electronic paper product that you can write on with a Wacom pen. It's going to be really expensive when it hits the consumer market but at some point it will be feasible for students to carry around flexible plastic displays that they can view any document in and write on it. Until that day, I'll just keep following the story and keeping track of it on delicious.