Love the Amazon Kindle, but not at school
I got an Amazon Kindle 2 at the end of February and absolutely love the ability to take a whole heap of books with me anywhere I go! I also love being able to look up a word without ever leaving the page that I am reading, and those are only a couple of the cool features of this little device. If you want to know more, here’s a review that has great pictures and all the details about Amazon’s latest e-book reader.
The Kindle 2 is not, however, ready for school or library use. Kindle’s proprietary design requires the user to have an Amazon account with a credit card attached in order to purchase and download books, which would really wreak havoc on a school district’s purchasing and inventory process. Books purchased for the Kindle actually live in the buyer’s Amazon account, so it is not possible to buy Kindle books for the school with a personal credit card and be reimbursed with district funds.
Rumor is that Amazon is in the development phase of an educational Kindle that will allow it to be used in a school setting. Until then, get one for yourself, but not your library.
Image source: Steinbeck on Kindle 2 by TreyDanger.
April 18th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
North Carolina State University Library (NCSU, 2009) loans 18 Kindles for book checkout. They use a book recommendation form that is vetted by the library staff. The collection is patron driven and each Kindle carries a different set of titles. The Kindles are catalogued in the OPAC where each title can be listed. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/learningcommons/ebooks.html
Kathy Schrock also has a pilot project in her library and has discovered “you can have up to 6 Kindles tied to one Amazon account, and, if you buy a single title, you are allowed to put it on all 6 of them”. http://kathyschrock.net/blog/2008/06/kindle-update.html
April 18th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
@Nan – Thanks for the info. We will definitely explore a little more, but school purchasing laws in Texas make it difficult for us.