Photo Note:

I’ve had more time to play around with the Astak, and the bloom is off the rose. Yes, the e-ink screen is truly amazing, and far clearer than the touch-sensitive Sony reader’s. However, it has certain other problems.

In Praise of Astak

Before I start talking about the Astak’s shortcomings, I should mention that the company itself has some astoundingly good customer service. For one thing, they monitor the Astak forums on MobileRead and pop up to answer questions.

Whenever I have posted a technical question on the forum, I have almost immediately been emailed by an Astak representative with suggestions and offers of advice. Now, granted, I do not know whether this is their default behavior toward all users, or just because they know I’m reviewing their product. I’d like to think the former is true.

Another nice thing about the device itself is that the firmware is remarkably easy to upgrade. Just put the firmware file on an SD card, slide the card in, and reboot into upgrade mode using a combination of keypresses.

My only complaint in this regard is that the instructions I found for upgrading on their website were not entirely clear. One of the buttons to be pressed is mentioned as the “increase volume key”. I assumed that meant the rocker switch on the right—but after that did not work and I searched some more, I learned that those instructions only applied to the 6” Astak reader devices; for the 5”, you press the page-forward button left of the screen instead. Just a little confusing.

Now let’s talk about some of those shortcomings.

Battery Life

One of the things that makes e-ink so great is that it only uses power when you turn the page. The e-ink page uses micro-capsules that are rotated by current, but require no current to stay set as they are. This is why e-ink readers have such a long battery life.

This should mean that, theoretically, an e-ink reader should use almost no power at all when it is “idling”. I should be able to leave it “open,” like a book, for days on end and pick it up with the same battery level that I left off.

(Granted, there may need to be some minor power consumption—but since it is not driving a display, surely it should use less than a digital watch, which is able to run for months on a single tiny battery.)

Unfortunately, this is not the case with the Astak. If I leave it alone for several days and forget to plug it in, the battery drains completely dry—and requires approximately “overnight” to charge back up to full again. This puts a damper on what ought to be one of an e-ink reader’s biggest advantages.

A Peeling Reader

I also noticed that my sample has started to develop a flaw remarked upon by other Astak users: the peeling paint problem. About half of Astak owners have found that, with a little wear, the paint covering their reader starts to peel off. Here you can see it starting on mine, right around the left page-turn arrows. (You may need to click to enlarge it to see more clearly.)

It is only a cosmetic problem, of course, and Astak’s excellent customer service again comes to the fore: they will, on request, provide replacement units that do not suffer from this flaw. Not everyone even cares about a replacement; one Astak user on the Baen Bar has just peeled all the paint off of his and been quite happy to keep using it that way.

Ex-Calibre

For some reason, I have not been able to make Calibre work with the Astak. I am not sure whether this is the Astak’s problem or some flaw with Calibre (which worked just fine with my Sony).

When I posted to MobileRead about it, it was suggested that I should remove the Chinese language manual from internal memory, as it messes with Calibre’s ability to connect.

I wanted to try to do this, but it seems at the moment I cannot get the reader to connect to my computer’s USB at all. It just shows a “charging” indicator and blinking light, and does not give me a “press Enter to connect” dialogue. But others seem to be able to use Calibre with their devices just fine.

It was not a great handicap, however; I ended up just using an SD card reader to copy my books directly onto my card, which I then put in the Astak. It just takes a few extra steps to make the copy.

If I were going to keep this reader, I might be more concerned about getting Calibre working with it—but since I will be sending it back, I am not going to let it bother me.

Moving on to formats…

Mobipocket vs. ePub

First of all, the majority of the books I read are unencrypted ePub these days, from Baen. I recently downloaded all of my Webscription purchases and put them on a directory of the 2-gig SD card I normally use for my digital camera, and put that in the Astak. The books load right up with no problem.

Reading ePub books on the EZReader is, well, “EZ”. They load quickly, and I am able to access the table of contents, zoom, search, even use the read-aloud feature (once I had updated the firmware to the latest version).

However, a Mobipocket book I read on it did not fare so well. This was 1634: The Baltic War, from one of the Baen CDs hosted on The Fifth Imperium. It was not available in ePub format, so I loaded the Mobi.

I found that, though I was able to read the file, the Astak reader was unable to parse the Mobi table of contents. There was a table of contents I could jump to, but it was all HTML links and I couldn’t figure out how to click on any of those links (if it was even possible at all). I ended up having to use the “jump to page” function in the menu to navigate through the book.

Furthermore, every so often the reader would lose track of my place. I would turn it back on to find myself a few dozen or hundred pages back from where I had been. If I find myself faced with a Mobi-only title in the future (at least while I still have the Astak), I will probably go to the extra trouble to convert it with Calibre first.

eReader and PalmDoc

In email correspondence, Bob Barry, the Director of Global Business Development for Astak, said that the Astak already supports non-DRMed books in Fictionwise’s eReader format, and they are negotiating to add support for eReader DRM as well.

However, I tried testing with three unencrypted eReader books I created myself and that I had verified opened on other devices, and the Astak did not even see them in a directory listing of the SD card. Very disappointing. It appears the Astak may not be the eReader e-reader of my dreams after all.

I was able to open a book in the PalmDoc format, though since it had no table of contents navigation through it would have the same problem as Mobipocket.

Awkward File List Navigation

I should also note that the navigation through the file list is a bit of a pain if you have a large directory. My Baen e-book files take 27 screens to list, alphabetically by title, and there is not any way to jump to specific titles. (Nor can I sort them in any way except title, date, or type, which is not terribly useful in this situation.)

So if I were to want to read Worlds of Honor or Young Miles, I would have to resign myself to paging through 27 pages of files to get to the ones I wanted.

I suppose if I copied my Calibre directory onto the card rather than my unsorted Baen ePub directory I might at least be able to navigate the directory tree by author, but I would still need to know what author wrote the book I wanted.

However, I cannot now remember whether Sony’s file list interface was any better.

PDF

But the PDF format is where the Astak easily falls the shortest. I had expected that, being a more recent device, it should handle PDF files at least as well as the Sony did. (You may wish to read my review of the Sony’s PDF capabilities for comparison purposes.) However, its performance left a number of factors to be desired.

First of all, I loaded the image-only PDF of “Bronte’s Egg”. Full-page, it looked about the same as it did on the Sony, only smaller by an inch. However, when I used the “rotate” option and turned the reader 90 degrees, when I pressed “page forward” the device simply crashed back out to the file list again. I tried multiple times, and it always behaved in this way.

Moving on to Dragon Warriors, we see that in both the portrait and landscape versions, the text looks pretty good. The problem comes when we use the “zoom” function, to break the PDF out of its formatting and zoom the text in a few times. The result: the first column on the page is nowhere to be found. The text below the header starts at the beginning of the second column.

(The Sony was not perfect in this regard either, but at least it put the “Introduction” header at the middle of the page and kept the first column of text before it. But no amount of paging up would reveal that first column of text in the Astak.)

Spycraft, the 160-megabyte overformatted bloat-monster, took more than a little time to load, but once it did it looked fairly decent, if much too small to read. Rotating 90 degrees did improve the readability some—but attempting to zoom in further simply zoomed out instead—and it remained zoomed out through each of the several zoom levels, until I finally reached the one that zoomed it back in to its original half-page view.

Also, zooming, rotating, and page-turning were all extremely sluggish—not that I am surprised, given the 160-megabyte size of this monster.

Spirit of the Century, a much smaller book and less-bloated PDF, came off considerably better. The smaller page size meant it is more readable in general on the Astak, and the non-cruft formatting meant it came off considerably better zoomed in as well.

Tables of Discontent

One other annoyance had to do with the table of contents. The Astak would read the PDF’s table of contents, and this included multi-level TOCs such as the one from Spycraft.

In a multi-level table of contents, if I clicked on “4. Chapter 4: Skills” I would get another table of contents, starting off with “1. Chapter 4: Skills” and then listing subheads for 2, 3, and 4.

So assuming I want to start off at the beginning of Chapter 4, I would click 1 for “1. Chapter 4: Skills”, right? Wrong. Clicking 1 would put me back at the main TOC. To go into the chapter, I would need to click 2 or up for one of the subheads. This is not a very intuitive interface design.

Conclusion

Although ePub files are a joy to read on the Astak, other formats are considerably less so—and the interface makes getting to those files somewhat awkward when I have a lot of them. With that in mind, though I am enjoying using it while I have it, I find I will not regret sending it back when the time comes.

Here are a few things I learned:

electronic paper was developed in 1975 by Nick Sheridon at Xerox PARC, who is now part of a spin-off called Gyricon LLC, and he says that current monochrome technologies cannot be modified to do color;

Philips Research is working on color displays using a techlology called in-plane electrophoretics, which is different from E Ink’s electrophoresis technique;

The Novel Devices Lab at the University of Cincinnati is working on a technology called electrofluidic display whose pigments, they say, look as good as they would on paper;

Sheridon believes that e-paper will eventually make current desktop displays obsolete.

Lots more interesting stuff in the article. Thanks to Dan Bloom for the link.

Evidently the company almost folded as it started out by making signs for business. The idea was that retailers could update their signs via pagers, however the pager technology, not the e-ink, wasn’t up to the job. Nearly out of cash they dumped all their projects and decided to continue with just one – making a display for a digital reader that Sony was planning. The rest is history.

Thanks to Dan Bloom for the link.

The Screen

First of all, the 800×600-resolution screen. I love the screen. Of course, it is probably the same screen that any non-touch-sensitive e-ink reader has, but compared to the Sony I tested before the difference is like night and day. The touch-sensitive Sony had a huge amount of glare—but on the Astak, the glare is not there.

The words are ink-on-paper clear; if the background is greyer than normal book-quality paper, it is not much darker than the newsprint on which daily papers are printed.

The screen is quite legible for reading, as the photo at left should show. Even (especially) in bright sunlight, it is readable without screen glare. Of course, it does lack the sidelighting of the Sony, but so do “real” books. If reading in the dark was really important to me, I would invest in a clip-on booklight for the snap-on case.

Page-turn time is about comparable to the Sony; it takes a second or two but is not an undue burden (unless you suddenly need to flip back 3 or 4 pages to reread something you missed; then it is a slight hassle but only slight).

Controls

Ergonomically, I like the device for the most part. For example, it has three sets of page-turn controls: the two arrow buttons left of the screen, the “9” and “0” buttons below the screen, and the jog switch to the right of the screen (not visible in the above photo).

This offers a lot of flexibility in ways to hold the device. Since I walk with a cane in my right hand, I find I can hold it in my left and turn pages with my thumb quite easily—more easily, in fact, than I can read and turn pages with my iPod Touch. Also, the reader is small and light enough that holding it in one hand is not an undue strain—unlike the heavier Sony.

However, if I should need to hold it one-handed with my right, turning pages is not so easy. It is possible, if I hold the lower right corner and work the jog dial with my index finger or press the “9” and “0” buttons with my thumb, but is a bit unwieldy. I would have much preferred another set of arrow keys like on the left.

Rotation

Another problem comes in terms of screen rotation. The device only provides the option to rotate in one way: turning the device 90 degrees left. This places the left arrow buttons below the screen, and the ten number keys and menu/escape buttons on the right.

This is obviously meant for right-handed people, because those who hold in their left now have no one-handed page-turn method available to them—but righties can press the “9” and “0” keys with their thumb.

What’s more, the functions of the arrow keys remain the same. So the key which is now on top, and whose arrow points “up,” turns the page forward, and the key whose arrow points “down” turns the page backward. This is somewhat counterintuitive.

I really would prefer an option for rotating 90 degrees right as well as left—but this is just an annoyance, not really a big problem.

Another minor ergonomic annoyance is that there are five font size zoom levels, but they can only be cycled through one way. So if you make the text one size larger than you meant to, it takes four more button presses to move back to the one before.

Slightly User-Unfriendly

The biggest overall problem with the Astak is that it is slightly user-unfriendly. I am one of those people who does not tend to like reading manuals; I want to just grab and go, right out of the gate.

For the most part, this is possible. But there are some things I had to look up in the manual to figure out how to do. (I still haven’t figured out how to adjust the volume when using the text-to-speech feature even with the manual.)

The ten-button-and-menu control scheme is also a touch unwieldy. This is most obvious in the search interface—for lack of a better keyboard, words are spelled out cell-phone-texting style, by pressing each button a set number of times to enter the right letter.

But just reading books is quite easy, once they are loaded. The screen is bright, clear, and legible. This may be the first e-book reader I’ve run across that is actually worth the purchase price, and I suspect I am going to miss it a lot more than the Sony when the time comes to send it back.

In my next post, I will talk about the reading experience of some of the different formats.

But first of all, here is the unboxing video I recorded the other day, in which I take it out of the box and take a first look at it. Enjoy.

“On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text.”

So writes Esquire’s pop critic, Stephen Marche, in the Wall Street Journal. This isn’t satire, but rather his serious opinion.

In real life, Kindle owners like Affiliate, seen in the Creative Commons photo above, would probably express enthusiasm but show far more commonsense and restraint. Here’s my own take on the Kindle 2. It comes away a number of negatives: onerous Digital Rights Management, focus on a proprietary format, high price, less than perfect contrast between text and the screen background. I myself took great pleasure in knocking the original Kindle (right photo below) for its adding-machine looks and ergonomic challenges such as hair-trigger page controls. What’s more, Amazon needs to treat writers and publishers better—much better.

That said, I’m pleased to give the Kindle 2 (left) its due. The positives:

1. The hair-trigger problem is gone and page turning controls are mostly just where I’d want them—in fact, better positioned than those on various Sony Reader models. While my fingers are over the controls, I feel as if the 10-ounce weight is distributed well. I like the controls off to the side rather than on the the bottom (or present in the form of minuscule buttons). One improvement for me would be to put both the previous-page and next-page controls on the same side.

2. A simple unofficial font hack for the Kindle 2 can now helps with the contrast problem by making the characters bolder. Hacks exist for the Sony Reader—I haven’t tried them. But the Kindle hack seems the easiest.

3. The text-to-speech capability is great for walking or other forms of exercise, or in the future for long drives. Shame on Amazon for knuckling under to misguided publishers, when TTS is one of the 2’s best features. This feature will boost e-book sales to the point where the increased revenue will more than compensate for lost audio book sales.

4. Amazon’s prices and book selections could be better—but remain competitive. This may not be true in the future if the company keeps walling itself off from the ePub world. More and more publishers will focus on the ePub format if current trends hold up. Jeff Bezos has hinted the the company might do ePub; time for a little action.

5. I love the dictionary, even though it would be wonderful if I could simply use a stylus to point at the appropriate word.

6. My most-often used reader remains my iPod Touch, but at least now I can use the K2’s synching feature to keep my place in a book while going back and fourth between machines. WhisperSynch isn’t perfect, sometimes it loses track of where I am, but it is a good start. Believe me, the IDPF or someone else needs to come up with an inter-device page-synching standard that would work across a number of brands. It should even coordinate text and audio books (yes, real audio books, as opposed to those created in effect by text to speech).

As for the aesthetics, the adding machine look is gone, though it would be nice for the case to be darker, which, as others have noted, would improve the perceived contrast.

Hey, I call ‘em as I see ‘em. I can’t wait to see what Amazon does with future Kindles—starting, I’d hope, with the inclusion of ePub.

(Gushy WSJ article via Kindle Review.)

The reading software includes FBReader, which can handle nonDRMed ePub, unencrypted Mobipocket HTML, TXT, and a bunch of other formats.

Of special interest, to me, is that you can choose to boldface all the text—rather handy, given the less than stellar contrast of the current generation of E Ink displays. The text will stand out better against the not-quite-white backgrounds of the screens.

This is one reason why I’m so opposed to DRM. As good as OpenInkpot seems to be if you go by the feature set, you can’t use it to read “protected” bestsellers.

Here’s a list of supported and nonsupported machines. Alas, at least for now, OpenInkpot isn’t usable on such popular machines as the Cybook Gen3, the Sony Reader 505, the iRex iLiad or, due to hardware limits, the Kindle. But in some cases, you’re in luck if you own a Hanlin or Astak machines or certain other brands, so click on the link.

(Via Felix Torres.)

What’s more, to help address her eye problems, she said she’d try a font hack we reviewed.

Like me, she’s less than delighted with the K machine’s proprietary format and DRM. Still, she is intrigued by, among other things, the wireless access.

But which accessories to buy? In response to my query, here are thoughts from the helpful Felix Torres, with some additional information edited in:

The type on Kindles just is not large enough. Jeff’s machines won’t even let you bold all the words in a book—a failing shared by most other e-reading devices. The low contract of E Ink, between text and background, just worsens matters.

For now, however, at least if you’re sufficiently technical and own a 2 rather than an original Kindle, a partial solution exists for the size issue—a large-print font hack for the Kindle 2. Big thanks to TeleRead community member Felix Torres for pointing people to the related instructions.

You might also be in luck if you own a Kindle DX.

The experimental hacks for both machines provide a little help, too, in the bold area.

But why does Amazon make its customers go to all this trouble; especially, how about the nontechnical? Next time Amazon gives us some PR spiel about being a Good Guy company, just ask about its callous treatment of visually impaired. Funny. I thought Amazon and other dedicated device makers wanted to grow the market for e-reading. Can’t visually impaired people, too, be customers? (An aside: The Amazon-related rants are mine, not Felix’s.)

Machines best suited for large print

So what devices might be better than Kindles for people with vision problems? Felix observes:

“Cybooks do a good job of displaying a fairly large font size and the Hanlin V3’s (BeBook, Astak EZReader, etc) when running OpenInkpot do a fabulous job at large print rendering; any font, any spacing, any margins, any point size up to well past 40-points, plus there is a full-screen bold option,” Felix says. Of course, use of Open Inkpot probably means you can’t read DRMed books—please correct me if I’m wrong.

The built-in Adobe Digital Editions firmware “has no shortage of bugs and design misteps,” Felix goes on, “but lack of large font display isn’t one of them; it offers at least two very large font sizes in both portrait and landscape orientation.

“Options exist as long as you’re not dealing with PDFs and locked-down epubs.”

Oh, how I hate the locked-down philosophy. Readers should be able to control print sizes, and I almost wonder if Washington shouldn’t pass legislation banning such lock-downs in books in situations where they can be avoided. The designer as the Devil? Absolutely. Readers first!

But could better displays, more powerful CPUs, smaller sizes and other wrinkles change that?  Microsoft, Apple and CrunchPad are said to have some new tricks up their sleeves—and over at PC Magazine, Lance Uboff is upbeat.

If tablets take off—both pure tabs and convertible laptops—will that steal lots of sales from the E Ink readers in the Kindle vein? Are the pickings big enough for everyone?

Detail: The Uboff piece would have benefited from mention of PixelQI display technology. It lets you choose between a glowing color screen or a low-power mode with E Ink-type qualities. Refresh rates are far higher than current E Ink’s, making full-motion video possible.

Related: E-book-friendly tablet coming from Microsoft? Pure speculation,

Second image: That’s a Microsoft Courier tablet prototype.

Now a Web site owned by Conde Naste, a conglomerate famous for its fashion coverage, tells us that “Tablet PCs might be headed toward a revival.”

The Conde-owned Wired site made that observation in a  write-up on the $500 Archos Tablet PC, which will run Windows 7.

Says Wired: “Until earlier this year, most analysts and industry watchers saw tablets as a category that wouldn’t catch on with consumers. Tablets are not as compact as smartphones and don’t have a physical keyboard that could make them a real alternative to netbooks. But with rumors of Apple working on a tablet, the category seems to have caught the interest of other device manufacturers. Dell is also reportedly working on a tablet.” And of course we know about the Courier prototype, the fold-like-a-book prototype from Microsoft. But $500 for a non-Apple tablet from Archos?

What will excite me will be cheapie, Asus-style netbooks serving also as tablets and maybe using the PixelQi display, which can show color for many purposes, but can slip into a low-power E Ink-style monochrome mode for e-reading. Now that would be undeniably useful innovation.

Meanwhile all the talk about dual-screen notebooks amuses me. Old stuff, friends. A company called Every Book—one or two words?—was pushing the concept around ten years ago or so. There was also the iRiver protype shown here. I see that the new iRiver e-reader has shed a screen. A lesson learned somewhere?

But wait! Will the Microsoft Courier prototype set the latest trend after all, with its twin screens? You never know. Some TeleRead community members are warming up to the dual screen idea, for reasons noted here.

Will we see more bargains like this? Never would I have suspected prices would drop so much, so quickly. The $100 Kindle is used, not refurbished. But perhaps the $149 price for refurbs is driving down used-Kindle prices.

The razor blade angle: Amazon’s Kindle Store reportedly may be backing off from offering free books. Could this be one way to help reduce the prices of new Kindles—by trying to jack up revenue through book sales instead? More of a razor blade strategy in action? And will Amazon try to raise book prices directly, given all the howls from large publishers about $9.95 bestsellers?

Related: $149 to be typical price for refurbished original Kindles? And $219 for reburbished Kindle 2?

My Sony Reader is a teacher’s pet. Mine. I’m the teacher, and it’s a valuable classroom tool.

How? Well, I don’t just use my Reader for “reading” in the traditional sense. It’s also as a way to take long or important files with me for reading on the go.

My instruction manuals, recipes message board threads, magazine articles and anything text-based—I can easily save them all in HTML. Then I can import the files into Calibre and tag them to group into collections, which I can then load into my Sony.

Please note that the Sony isn’t the only reader useful for taking along professional materials and personal documents. You might be able to do the same thing with your Kindle, for example, or Cybook, iLiad or Be Book. If the material isn’t in digital form, perhaps you can scan and OCR it.

One recent use I have found for my Reader is managing my unit plans for teaching. I live in Canada and teach primary school French, and the program we use is music-and-drama based. I haven’t loaded any of the stories onto my Reader—I use paper ones, as the children do, so I can model it for them—but the Sony is already a helpful place to store my lessons.

A teaching guide

Each unit is based around a play, and it comes with all the material one needs for the children, as well as a massive spiral-bound teaching guide with step-by step teaching activities. The activities are sequential, meant to be done in order. They are very well-planned and include a lot of detail. Here is an example of a typical 1-2 page activity from the teaching guide:

Note: Scripted text is in French; translated to English here for illustration. Words in ALL CAPS are new vocabulary from the lesson’s word list

ACTIVITY 43: Targeted Gesture Teaching and ReviewMultiple intelligences: verbal-linguistic, interpersonal, kinesthetic, spatial
Language skills: speaking, listening

As you can see, there is a lot of superfluous information. It’s important to read the manual once through so that one understands the language skills being used, and the multiple intelligences at play in the program. But when teaching subsequently, it’s self-explanatory. It’s obvious that the children will be speaking and listening. It’s obvious that if you tell the children, “This is a DVD,” you should then show it to them. It’s obvious that if a student gives you the correct answer, you should praise them. And it’s obvious too why each manual is about 400 pages!

Hassle to drag in the actual paper books

That said, I’ve found in the past that I have been hampered by being too lazy to bring the book with me. Sometimes, I plan to do one activity, and actually get through it faster than I thought. If I rely on post-it note cheat sheets, I may not have information about the next activity ready and available when and where I want it.

But carrying the books around with me is not an option either. Most French teachers, myself included, don’t have dedicated classrooms. I share a resource cupboard in another classroom with the gym teacher and carry around my things in a tote while I travel around from class to class.

My typical load: a calendar for the entry routine, a folder with my schedule and memos, puppets for the JK/SK classes, a ball to use for filler games, oversize ‘big books’ for reading the play with the kids, any photocopies I need of work for the children to complete with me, a netbook with all my MP3s and Power Points on music days—the list goes on and on.

I have two grade levels doing this program, so that’s two unit guides, with all their accoutrements, and about half of it duplicated content anyway—the first hundred-odd pages are all about the philosophy of the program, charts showing how it meets the provincial curriculum requirements etc. and are the same in every unit guide. And as we have seen, the actual lesson parts are not brief.

Organizing challenges

Thankfully, the unit guides have an appendix with all the word lists in order. For awhile, I was working off of a photocopy of these, accompanied by a checklist of rough lesson descriptions. Every time I did a lesson with the kids, I would refer to the checklist for a hint of what we were meant to be doing, then flip back to the word list and keep that out while I was teaching.

It wasn’t the best system because I didn’t have the space on the word list page for any notes or reminders, so I’d often find myself rooting in my bag during a lesson for a page I didn’t have out with me. And two of my three older classes are doing the same play, so I had double the paper cluttering up my bag, which made it harder to find things, and harder to ensure that when I did find it, I had the one for the group I was with.

The complete book

What I really needed was to have the bulky teacher book in front of me, only less bulky and with all the superfluous information edited out. A summary of the activity, the words needed for it, and a brief line or two of any mnemonic notes would suffice. I needed more than random sticky notes, but less than a 400-page teaching manual.

I finally had the brainstorm to put it all on my Reader. I had about 100 lessons per unit to go through.

For each, I wrote a brief description and then plugged in the word list. It was about a 2-3 hour investment for each play, but it was worth it because now I am set for the year. Instead of having a bulky teacher’s guide in front of me, I have my reader. It’s small and convenient. I can easily turn the page when we’re finished and have the next activity ready to go at any time.

Used to Ms. Gizmo

The kids are so used to seeing me with gadgets that they hardly notice the Reader. When I start my lesson, I can just open up their file, and there I am, just where I left off the last time. The Sony remembers my place. Best of all, being a computer file, it’s easy to copy.

My two Grade 1 classes do the same play, but because they only have French four days a week, and sometimes not on the same days, they aren’t always at the same point in the unit work. I can have two copies of my little guidebook, one for each of them, and pick up my lesson exactly where I need to for each different group.

Here is the above two-page lesson, in its entirely, following the edits I did:

ACTIVITY 43: Gesture Teaching/ReviewWord list:
taille
casse
problème
par accident
désolé
apporte

E-book version not full replacement for teaching guide

I am not saying my ebook version can replace a well-written teaching guide completely, of course. As a teacher, I need to know my stuff, and the philosophy, teaching tips, curriculum guidelines and other details are important. But they are not so important that I need to carry around 2-3 versions of them in my poor, over-loaded tote and have them in front of me for the moment I am teaching. I can keep those on the cupboard for review during planning, and use my little ebook version for the quick and dirty ‘teach this now’ part of my day.

I love having the word list and lesson description in front of me in the same place. I love that if we finish something early, the next activity is always ready to go. I love that I can keep separate versions of the teaching guide for each class, and let the Reader remember for me where I left off with each of them. And I love that I can keep my entire school-wide curriculum in my hands at any moment, at home, when planning, and in front of my eyes when I teach. I can’t believe I didn’t think to put this all on my Reader sooner!

Five titles from Kaplan Publishing for law and nursing students will be available at the iTunes store via the Stanza e-reader.

More titles will appear for students with access to iPhones or iPod Touches. Medicine will be among the fields included.

This will happen through arrangements between Kaplan Publishing, LibreDigital (digital publishing service provider) and Amazon’s Lexcycle subsidiary (developer of Stanza).

Kaplan Test Prep is offering the Stanza option after a survey showed nearly 45 percent of its students next year will have access to iPhones and iPod Touches.

The first five titles are:

• The Law School Labyrinth: A Guide to Making the Most of Your Legal Education ($13.99).
• Legal Writing: How to Write Legal Briefs, Memos, and Other Legal Documents in a Clear and Concise Style ($16.99).
• First Year Nurse: Wisdom, Warnings, and What I Wish I’d Known My First 100 Days on the Job (Second Edition) ($4.99) [no link provided, apparently – D.R.].
• How to Survive Clinical: Advice from the Nursing Students and Teachers Who Have Been There ($8.99).
• Your Career in Nursing: Managing Your Future in the Changing World of Health Care (Fifth Edition) ($11.99).

Kaplan aims to deliver its students content in the format best suited to their evolving needs.

It is working with technology pioneer LibreDigital to deliver Kaplan content to the Stanza e-reader. With over two million users spanning 60 countries, Lexcycle’s Stanza is one of the leading e-book readers for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Stanza, which features customizable formatting and searching, has drawn more than 12 million book downloads.

Book Descriptions:

• Law School Labyrinth: A comprehensive guide to law school, from the admissions process to beyond graduation. 
• Legal Writing: A guide to legal writing for the legal practitioner covering clear, concise writing with an eye towards the tools of the information age. 
• First Year Nurse: Wisdom and warnings from hundreds of experienced nurses.
• How to Survive Clinical: A pocket-sized guide featuring quotes, anecdotes, and advice from both recently graduated nursing students and current professors that will help new students face the academic and emotional challenges 
• Your Career in Nursing: Up-to-date information on trends in nursing practice, nursing education, and health care technology…

About Kaplan Publishing

Kaplan Publishing, a leading publisher of academic and professional development resources, offers a trade program that includes non-fiction narratives that educate and entertain. Kaplan Publishing is a unit of Kaplan, Inc., a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO).

    Contact:  Tim Brazier
              Publicity Director
              212.618.2432
              Tim.Brazier@kaplan.com

======================

KAPLAN CUSTOMERS APPARENTLY CAN’T USE THE SAME EPUB FILES ON DESKTOPS AND LARGER TABLETS. TIME FOR THIS TO CHANGE?

David again. This is mostly a very smart move by Kaplan.

Of course let’s hope that Kaplan will provide videos or other instruction for students who don’t pick up technology easily.

What’s more, Kaplan and its digital tech partners need to enlighten us about the copy-protection issue—the topic of the discussion below. Protection isn’t through the usual DRM. But it’s still interfering with typical students’ ability to use the ePub files on a variety of devices.

The positives of the Kaplan approach: Use of Stanza and ePub

Lexcycle’s Stanza is my favorite e-reader app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

And that isn’t merely because the ePub is Stanza’s flagship format (ePub is the IDPF standard and can generally work well on small screens).

You can customize Stanza just so, adjusting font sizes and styles and even the spacing between lines.

Also, Stanza lets you access Arial Rounded MT Bold. So far I’ve found this to be the easiest font to read on my iPod Touch.

The big frustration: Apparently no use of the same files on desktops and larger tablets

At the same time, I’d like the students to be able to use the ePub books on desktops, larger tablets and other machines, too; and some major questions emerge in this area.

The Kaplan books use “secure wrapped iPhone App,” according to a spokesperson for LibrieDigital. “That’s not to say that it can’t be tampered with, but it is to say that it would not be something that an average consumer would do. (i.e.: ‘Secure enough’ without additional DRM wrap).”

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the same books won’t be usable on desktops and other machines able to run ePub-capable software. At least that will be true of students without the skills to do the necessary extracting and file-jockeying.

If the above is the case, then I hope Kaplan and the others involved will reconsider.

About “secure wrapped” 

In a related vein, just what does “secure wrapped” mean?

Is this a different kind of wrapping from what O’Reilly Media uses on Stanza-wrapped iPhone apps, from which it says users can extract ePub for display on other machines?

Presumably the wrapping is different, but I’m just guessing. Will we see more and more educational material for the iPhone/Touch handled this way?

RX for Kaplan: Easy unwrapping and social DRM

At any rate, in Kaplan’s place, if it wants to make its books as attractive as possible for students, I’d make ePub files easily unwrappable—while using social DRM to discourage piracy, given the special piracy concerns in the education market

O’Reilly does tell how to unwrap its file. But its procedures could be simpler. The industry needs standards to make it a cinch for even nontechnical users to extract and manage ePub files for one-book Stanza apps. Apps offer quick access to material and can be an option. But students should also have the ability to access the ePub books through regular Stanaza and delete the apps. Or, of course, use the ePub files on other devices.

iPhone not for every student at every time

I appreciate the need to counter piracy. But, again, will students be able to display the same material for their private use on desktops and larger-screened tablets?

iPhones and Touches are wonderful for reading on the go, but for many students they may not be the optimal platform for hour after hour of study, given the small screen size. If nothing else, how about disabled students with special needs?

If nothing else, what about books with detailed illustrations? Or the preference of some students for E Ink machines, which will be getting better and better?

See the risk of an approach tied too closely to a particular type of hardware, no matter how popular?

Related issue: Kaplan better off creating digital material from scratch?

And of course there’s the related issue of whether Kaplan in the future might be better off creating content from scratch rather than just adapting paper books, assuming it isn’t doing this already.

Perhaps the new offerings could be designed so screen size didn’t matter as much as with adaptations of traditional books. And yes, there could still be paper editions. But here’s to “born digital,” so the material can be easily repositioned. This would be in line with some recommendations in a recent Gilbane report.

Your own thoughts—and maybe some from the companies involved?

OK, what are your own thoughts on these matters?

Meanwhile I very much hope that the companies involved can join this discussion, if they want to get closer to end users.