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Dear EDUCAUSE: Please Kindle Your Publications
This week I checked out our Library's Kindle 2 so I could test the thing myself.
My main need is to be able to manage my professional reading. Many PDFs cross my desk, and I end-up carrying lots of print-outs around. It would be ideal to have these all in my e-book reader.
Why Kindle? Well ... I'm very much hooked into the Amazon ecoystem and I may want to also read a book or two.
My first experiment was with the EDUCAUSE Review.
I was able to get this months copy on my Kindle .... but it was sort of painful. The steps involved downloading the PDFs one-by-one from the site, using Stanza desktop to convert the PDF to Kindle format (one-by-one) and then uploading them back to the Kindle.
After all that work the formatting still gets sort of messed up.
The native PDF reader in the Kindle DX is probably reason enough to go with the DX if I were to purchase a Kindle today (I'm not...I'm going to wait into the next generation).
So my request to EDUCAUSE - please provide a (free) Kindle ready (and other e-book ready) file on your site for all your publications. Or make the e-book file (please one file per issue) available to EDUCAUSE members. I'm not sure of the business model, but I am sure going forward that publishers (including professional journals) will need to provide e-book formats.
Is anyone out there using e-book readers to manage and keep up with their professional reading? How's it working out for you?
Has anyone tried to Kindleize a whole course? Or make a whole course available in an open e-book standard? Seems that having all the text content of a course, including articles and book chapters, available has one e-book file would go a long way toward making course reading more convenient. I could imagine a CMS extension that allows an instructor to push a button that will automatically create the an e-book version of all the text course content. Is anyone working on a course Kindle application?
