Your students need books that they will like reading. One way to get them those books is to hand them a hard copy. Another way, if you’ve got the right technology, is to give them an ebook. Anyone who has seen a Kindle is familiar with the basic idea of what an ebook is: it’s a computer file that contains a whole book. But the trouble with Kindles is that you’re locked into doing things the Amazon way: their files, their reader, their prices.
This post will offer a brief intro to open, free ways to acquire and read ebooks, with a focus on tools for doing this on tablets (read: the iPads your school has but doesn’t know what to do with) and mobile devices (read: the smartphones your students just use for Facebook, txting, and Angry Birds).
Fortunately, there are millions of books available in open, non-proprietary formats, and the most ubiquitous of those at the moment is the ePub format. Without going into the technical details, an ePub book is just all the words in a book (and maybe some images) wrapped up in a little file with standard instructions on where the chapters start and stop and info on the title, author, and publisher.
Lots of books that are no longer protected by copyright are available for free in epub format. Alas, as excited as I am to have downloaded free copies of Dracula and Moby Dick, I might have a tough time selling those to my 7th graders. To dive right in, go download Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (description here). The YA book is about teenagers in San Francisco using their hacker skillz to thwart a Department of Homeland Security that has curtailed civil liberties to an unacceptable extreme in the wake of an imagined terrorist attack. Doctorow takes a very open stance on copyright protection, and would therefore rather have more copies of his books in readers’ hands than worry that he earned a few bucks off every copy in circulation. I whole-heartedly embrace his mindset when it comes to getting high-interest texts into the hands of reluctant readers.
So now you have a file sitting on your computer called “CoryDoctorow-LittleBrother.epub”. What do you do with it?
There are a bunch of different epub readers available for Windows and Mac; some are nifty little extensions that run in Firefox or Chrome. If your goal is to develop and manage a collection of ebooks (something I’ll aim to cover in the future), then you want the heavyweight Calibre software. If you just want to get your kids reading books on their computers or mobile devices, here are a few better solutions:
Just discovered this and wish I had seen it earlier. Bookwork allows you to create an account, then upload epub books online and read them in a web browser. The interface is utilitarian, but it offers a simple mobile reading format that is very readable on mobile devices and iPads.
The learning curve here is pretty low. You upload the files; they live in your account; you login and read them. I’ll be uploading several sets of books this weekend and adding the link to the class bookworm account to my Moodle site for students to access Monday.
Booki.sh is a very cute indie ebook reader built by some clever Australian developers. It has a more polished interface than bookworm, but you can also upload epub files, sort them into your library, and they read them in a browser. The interface is optimized for iPads, so if you’re taking it for a spin, don’t just go by what it looks like on your laptop. This is actually how I do a lot of personal reading, because the site syncs bookmarks in the cloud: if I read a few pages on my iPhone, then I can open up my iPad later and go right to the spot where I stopped.
Booki.sh can also add books to your library directly from feedbooks.com, a major repository of public domain (free) books. But again, Pride and Prejudice may not appeal to all your students.
Amazon Cloud Reader
Okay, so I said earlier that Kindle wasn’t the best way to go, but Amazon currently dominates this market and has a well-designed browser reader. I asked a few friends to donate Kindle books through an Amazon Wishlist, so my scholars have access to a few books in the class library. Amazon also provides access to troves of public domain books.
There are many other apps for reading epub files on your devices, and your iPad has doubtless prompted you to download one of them: iBooks. But here’s the rub: moving books into iBooks requires going through a book-buying process similar to a Kindle, or else requires that you manage your files through iTunes. If you, as a classroom teacher, don’t have administrative access to move files or apps on and off your iPads, iBooks will be of limited use. If you do get ebook readers like Stanza installed on your tablets, you still have to manage moving files onto the devices.
When I think about optimal teaching tools for iPads or other class-room based technology, I usually want to see a solution that works in a browser. Because as locked down as a set of iPads may be, or as impossible as it may be to get new software onto computers in a school lab, you can almost always access the web.
Around 2000, I volunteered at a GoodWill book sale in Atlanta. The offerings of donated books were pretty extensive and the prices were rock-bottom. While I sorted shelves and helped folks checkout, I watched a man spend 90 minutes combing the sale floor and pulling each each and every copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He probably found 50 copies of various editions. When he checked out, he told us he was a high school English teacher and needed the texts for his class. Now, given the right hardware, he could get the same text for free in 60 seconds.
At the moment, the publishing world is in a state of flux as ebooks grow in popularity and reading devices become more affordable and available. The formats may change (VHS beat Betamax; Blu-Ray beat HD-DVD), but the bottom line is this: your kids need books, and ebooks are a powerful way to get them reading.