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Would you buy an ebook from this man?

I don’t like the new list for a couple reasons, mostly because I don’t trust the data sources (Amazon’s fiddled with their rankings before). But it turns out that I missed a huge problem with the list. It turns out that Lubart isn’t just the founder of IoByte; he is also currently a senior VP at HarperCollins for Sales Analytics.

Conflict of Interest, much?

I missed that detail yesterday because DBW didn’t disclose it anywhere.  It’s not mentioned in his post on the DBW blog (where it should have been at least mentioned as a footnote), nor is it listed in his author bio. The only person who noticed and made a big deal about it was Len Feldman. He noticed an offhand reference to this detail in Mike Shatzkin’s writeup of the story.

As shocking as it may be, you can confirm the info on Dan’s LinkedIn page (he’s worked for HC since October of last year). So what we have here is a best seller list which uses a secret algorithm based on the work of someone who didn’t tell us that he worked for a Big 6 publisher. Yeah, I must say that I am filled to the brim with confidence.

And I can’t help but feel that he was being deliberately deceptive. This detail was left out of DBW’s own press release, and even though Dan has a fairly detailed author’s bio on DBW, there was no mention of HarperCollins either. That failure to disclose renders all of Dan’s other posts on the DBW blog suspect.

It also raises questions about why so few self-pubbed ebooks made it on to the list.  As one reader reminded me on Twitter, Mike Shatzkin made a big deal yesterday about this very absence:

First of all, there is a striking lack of self-published material represented. There is not one self-published ebook in the overall Top 25 and only two appear at all, both on the lowest price band (from zero to $2.99).

Given that 4 Smashwords titles made the NYT list in a single week, it doesn’t really make sense that none would show up on the DBW ovarall list. How do we know that there isn’t some weighting against self-published ebooks? What else do you think they’re concealing from us?

Whoops. I hate it when news changes while I’m still working on a blog post, but apparently Dan’s bio has now been updated to reflect his current job at HC. That detail wasn’t there this morning nor was it there when I read up on Dan yesterday.

I still don’t trust the numbers. And the quiet way that DBW is adding a mention of HC after the fact (and after I asked the editor for a comment) doesn’t reassure me either.

Can you give me a compelling argument which would prove he wasn’t biased in the favor of his employer?

Lots of people in publishing get upset when readers object to the price of some ebooks, and often times you hear a retort about a cup of coffee. Brent Weeks made just that remark earlier this week, and his tweet set a minor record for insider retweets.  But have you ever considered whether the comparison of ebook prices and the cost of a cup of coffee was a valid one?

I hadn’t, but lucky for me earlier this week one reader sent me a link to a blog post by Josh Lehman.  Josh takes a look at the differences in markets for Starbucks coffee and apps, and while an app is not an ebook a lot of his points do transfer over.

Fact: Starbucks Coffee is a Trustable Experience

This is coming from a non-coffee drinker, but people buy Starbucks because they know what it’s going to be like. It will meet their expectations, and while it’s an experience that won’t change their lives it will be the same every time. People know that each cup of coffee will be exactly like the last. And if it’s not, Starbucks will remake it until the customer is satisfied. Would you make that same guarantee with your ebook?

Fact: Your eBook is a Total Gamble

I don’t know what your ebook will be like until I start reading it. Unlike Starbucks coffee, ebooks can vary by quality, genre, and even style – and that’s just for a single author, not the ebook market. The problem grows when you factor in situations where readers find an author for the first time. The experience of reading your ebook is not trustable. I have dozens of ebooks sitting unread on my computer right now; why should I shell out $13 for yours? Why should I even shell out $8 to get one of the ebooks on your backlist? Frankly the risk is too high for a potential gain of nothing.

Fact: Starbucks Has No Free Alternative

We cannot get a free cup of coffee, and even the cheap alternatives to Starbucks aren’t as good. But I can find alternatives to paid ebooks virtually everywhere – legal ones, too, and sometimes even from the same publisher as the one you want us to buy.

Fact: Free eBooks Are Often A Great Alternative

There are far more good free ebooks available right now than I could read in a lifetime, and I’m not just talking about the dregs of self-publishing. Baen Books, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg stand as 3 examples of quality free ebooks. And then there are the many authors like Cory Doctorow who have released some or all of their work for free, whether as a limited time offer or under a CC license.

Fact: Cheap Paper Books Are Often A Great Alternative

Here’s a point which Lehman couldn’t make, but definitely affects the price and value of ebooks. The used book market hasn’t gone away with the rise of ebooks; instead it has grown with the rise of Amazon and other sites. Publishers not only have to t compete with paid and free ebooks from other sources, but they also have to compete with their own cast off and used titles.

Fact: My Existing Library Is A Great Alternative to Your eBook

I can also read the many ebooks I’ve bought over the years instead of buying yours. While they are not your ebook, they do stand as a viable alternative for the few hours of diversion I’d get for the $13 I’d spend on your ebook.

Is There Hope for the Paid eBook?

Yes there is. You just have to give readers a good reason to buy.

Speaking as someone who balks at paying more than $6 for a fiction ebook, I myself bought a $15 ebook from Bane Books this week. It was an advance reader copy of the next Bujold novel (which won’t be published until November). The sample, which I read online, ended at a cliffhanger. That ebook was an experience I was willing to risk my money on because the free sample was a worthwhile read and the itch to finish reading the ebook was so great that I didn’t mind paying a high price.

via

Thanks, Merrill!

I saw a post on BoingBoing the other day spotlighting Singularity & Co., an online “science fiction bookstore” (who I covered in March for TeleRead) with a goal of rescuing obscure classic SF titles and releasing them on-line. The Kickstarter project that founded it (reaching $52,276 on a $15,000 goal) stated that this would involve clearing the rights for the book and “publish[ing] the title both online and as an e-book, for little or no cost.” The BoingBoing post paraphrased this as “publish[ing] it online as a free ebook.”

This sounds like a great idea, sort of akin to the “Storyteller’s Bowl” model of publishing similar to that used by Unglue.it: ask for a certain amount of money for the content, then when you get it release the content free. There’s just one little problem: the site doesn’t actually seem to work that way—at least so far. Two books have been “rescued” so far, but not only is there no way for people who haven’t paid to subscribe to access them “for little or no cost,” there is no indication that I could find on the site when or if this will actually happen.

Now, I will try to be fair: the posts about the books (first, second) indicate that they’re beta releases, and currently only available to people who paid (via the Kickstarter or the site’s subscription forms) for early access. But there’s no indication in either of those posts when they will be released in non-beta form—or, more importantly, how.

The site’s page about “Our Big Idea” expands a little upon what was said in the Kickstarter: once its subscribers have selected a work, Singularity will “publish that work online and on all the major digital book platforms for little or no cost.” Again, no specific details yet.

The site’s subscriptions page offers three levels of subscription: $2.99 for one year of “access to every book we save,” $129.99 for lifetime e-book access, and $199.99 for one year of print books plus lifetime e-book access. That doesn’t really look to me like making books available “for little or no cost.” Sure, maybe $30 for 12 books isn’t all that much per book, but what if you only want the one book?

I expect they do intend to make the books available to all at some point, but from the point of view of someone with no interest in subscribing but possible interest in buying inexpensively and definite interest in reading free, the lack of any information at all as to when or even if that will really happen makes me feel a little bait-and-switched when I show up there expecting the free e-books they promised.

Last week, the Authors Guild requested that a judge order Google to pay $750 per book in penalties for illegal copying of the works it had scanned for its Google Books project. (At 20 million books, that could add up pretty quickly.) The Authors Guild also wants a ruling definitively stating that copying books is not fair use.

$750 is an interesting figure, as Mike Masnick points out on Techdirt that it is actually the minimum statutory damage possible under the law. The Guild would be entitled to ask for up to $150,000 per work, which gets ridiculous pretty quickly. Of course, even $750 per book would total $15,000,000,000—that’s fifteen billion dollars.

Meanwhile, Google insists there is no evidence that its scanning has harmed even a single author, and that it has actually helped many—and that in creating an index rather than making the works available in whole form, it is making a transformative fair use.

Of course, by a strict reading of the law without exception, Google would be in trouble. It doesn’t deny that it did completely copy books that didn’t even belong to it. But the fair use defense exists to allow for uses that would ordinarily be violations but turn out to have beneficial uses that qualify them for exceptions. The crux of this case is whether Google Books qualifies for such an exception.

It kind of reminds me around some of the legal arguments in the early years of cable TV, that I learned about when I was studying broadcasting at college. Cable TV started out as networks of antennas designed to bring broadcast TV to people who lived in valleys that couldn’t get signal, and grew out from there.

And as cable TV operators found money in it, the cable TV operators and the TV station operators each claimed that the other was unfairly benefiting from its own effort: the station owners felt that the cable operators were making money from their content, and the cable operators felt the station owners were leeching a wider viewership from their network build-out. “You should pay us for the use of our stuff!” each side told the other.

To make a long story short, cable TV networks are still around today, no matter how much TV station owners once thought they were unfair. I suspect that Google Books will prove transformative enough that the courts will, eventually, deem it a fair use, at least to some extent.

Image by tarale.

OLPC, the One Laptop Per Child program, is determined to switch to tablets for their next device, but the XO-3 tablet won’t be out until at least 2013. Not everyone is willing to wait that long.

Just over a year ago Thailand decided to launch their own independent OTPC program, and the first shipment is coming off the trucks this week. This first shipment is going to first grade classrooms in 20 schools spread across 8 provinces of Thailand, and reports indicate that an additional 800 thousand tablets will be issued to first graders this coming year

The device in question looks to be a 7″ Android tablet from a Chinese manufacturer. It looks to have rather mixed specs and is running Android 4.0 on a Rockchip 2918 CPU. (Luckily it gets better from there.) The 7″ capacitive touchscreen has a resolution of 1024×600, and the tablet also has Wifi, Bluetooth, a pair of 2MP cameras, mike/speaker, and a g-sensor.

The 7″ tablet costs around 2500 baht (~$81 USD). Thailand is also looking at a 10″ model, but the price of 6000 baht (~$189 USD) has been deemed too expensive.

"The students who will receive the tablets will be able to take them home, if parents and teachers allow them. The children will have ownership of the tablets after three years," said Education Minister Suchart Thada-Thamrongvech.

Thailand also plans to distribute another 800 thousand tablet to 7th grade students this fall, but not all of the funds for the new tablets have been budgeted until the 2013 fiscal year, so there’s always a chance that this program will dry up. The 7th graders will be getting a more capable tablet which is expected to cost around 12,000 baht (~$379 USD).

On a related note, Apple is also participating in the project. They’ve donated 600 iPads to be used by students in 20 classrooms, and Apple is also organizing training courses for teachers. "Apple will train teachers to use the tablet and develop education applications to share in Apple’s App Store. The project participants will be able to use iCloud service to store content. The project will kick off this year," said a senior Thai official.

Thailand has a population of around 70 million, with a school age population (primary and secondary) of  just over 10 million. Over the long term this project is going to supply tablets to all Prathom (grades 1 through 6) students, though it’s not clear when this will happen.

New curriculum is currently being developed for grades 2 through 4 which will make use of the tablets, but it’s not clear when that will be released to the teachers. The Office of Basic Education Commission (OBEC) that it’s ready to distribute the tablets to the first graders now, and that it has 336 learning objects ready for use by the students.

So will it work? There have been some doubts that the Thai government was truly prepared to retrain teachers to make best use of the tablets rather than simply tossing them in the classroom in much the same manner as the Peru OLPC project. But I am reasonably confident that this project will turn out well.

Thailand is currently in its second decade to reform and modernize its education system. They’ve made significant improvements in teacher to student ratio, attendance, and the general quality of teaching. While this doesn’t guarantee that the tablet program will be a success, it does indicate that the Thai Mibistry of Education has the right general mindset.

via Bankkok Post

I’ve been in some rather large libraries, including Bryant Park branch of the NYPL and the Library of Congress, but if you want to talk about sheer size I think the city of Klagenfurt, Austria has set a new record. A non-profit group called Project Pingeborg is working to promoting among the population of Klagenfurt, and in doing so they’ve more or less turned their city into a library.

This project is still in the early stages, but what they’ve done so far is to place 70 QR codes around the city:

The QR codes each lead to a particular ebook or mp3, all of which can be downloaded for free. According to Project Pingeborg, the mp3s are drawn from Librivox, the CC licensed audiobook project, while the ebooks are pulled from Project Gutenberg which now offers over 40 thousand titles, including around a thousand in German (according to Project Pingeborg).

Technically the contents aren’t at each location, so this is more of an ad campaign than a library. But each title is tied to a specific location, and what’s more the links aren’t going to show up in Google (bless robots.txt). So this project is in effect giving digital content a finite location, thus removing one of the key aspects that separates paper books from ebooks. Each little sign with a QR code is more or less the shelf location of that ebook.

Interesting.

Project Pingeborg

You have probably read the Amazon-bashing story that’s going around today, but I think there’s a few details that some of the retellings have missed. (I’m expecting to see this story show up on the major tech blogs any moment now.) Once you get a little into it, the story isn’t what you think.

A travel writer by the name of Andrew Hyde was shocked – shocked, i tell you – to discover that Amazon charges a delivery fee for his Kindle ebook. He’d recently released a new ebook in Kindle, Epub, and PDF. Much to his surprise the Kindle edition earned the least per sale.

This was largely due to the fact that Amazon, as part of the 70% royalty rate, also charges to deliver the ebooks over 3G. Mr Hyde’s ebook, which was 18MB in size, cost him over $2.50 in fees each time he sold a copy in the Kindle Store.

Again, his ebook was 18MB in size, while most are well under 1MB.

He’s understandably shocked by the situation and he posted a rant on his blog. (Sidenote: Go read it. The other details are fascinating.)

I, for one, am not surprised.

Amazon has charged delivery fees for as long as they’ve offered the 70% royalty rate. It’s not at all a secret, and in fact you’d have to work really hard to not know about the fees. To be honest I do not see how you couldn’t know about the delivery charge after having chosen the higher royalty rate; all the info is on the same page. Nor is it hard to find.

As I see it, the real story here was that this author was surprised by the fees. That’s not quite so newsworthy, is it? (If not for the fact that Amazon is involved, I doubt that any blog would bother to post about this story.)

I rather admire the fellow for having the guts to post about his mistake, but it is his mistake. As bad as the fees might be in this particular case, Amazon does post the price schedule where anyone can read it. It’s not the fault of Amazon if he didn’t find the info.

Lots of other authors did know about it, and you can tell that from the many responses to a post on this story over on  The Passive Voice:

–Wow… I’ve never heard of costs this high. My books are always less than a few cents. It sounds like his image compression is not as standard as he thinks. He’s also making a big thing of whispernet fees. Fees that don’t apply in all areas. I would say the actual make up is .58 cents. The $2 is an additional fee charged occassionally depending on location.

–Agreed. Why should my lean, trim, de-bloated ebooks subsidize someone else’s fatsos? If this guy doesn’t want to do what it takes to get his delivery costs down, then he shouldn’t complain about paying the price for that.

–I had to comment here because I’ve seen so few authors mention this issue, and it’s something I deal with. I write illustrated books. In addition to other projects, I have a 5-book illustrated fantasy series for adults. My adult books have gorgeous watercolors and inks. There are usually about 18 full-page illustrations + character portraits and maps. These books are 50 – 60K words.

I sell most of my illustrated books for $4.99. Deliver costs average about 30 cents – not inconsequential, but manageable. As a point of reference, my text-only 300K omnibus also ends up costing about 30 cents per download in deliver fees. 50K words with illustrations vs 300K words without = same deliver costs for my books.

—

That being said, I want to highlight Hyde’s other response to the fees; other authors might want to0 copy it.

He’s now selling the Kindle edition of his ebook alongside the PDF. Both are sold DRM-free via an ecommerce site called Gumroad, and that’s a good thing. He’s found a way to avoid the fees while still supporting his readers, but his new alternative also stands as an example of why you might want to stay with ebookstores.

This site only charges credit card fees, not the 30% plus commission of any of the major ebookstores. But the site also doesn’t offer anything in terms of marketing, suggested selling, or even listing pages (not that I can see). All it does is process the payment and forward the file.

It’s effectively a DIY option for someone who wants to do their own marketing on Twitter, Facebook and an author website, and that might be a reason that some would choose not use it. But given that self-pub authors often do their own marketing, perhaps not.

  Kobo announced today that they’ve seen stellar growth in the past year. eBook sales and sales of the Kobo Touch are both up significantly. What’s more, Kobo has nearly quadrupled their user base, with the number of people reading with Kobo internationally reportedly being up by 280%.

Barnes & Noble made a huge splash this morning when they announced that they were spinning off the Nook into a new subsidiary, with Microsoft to buy 17% stake in the company for $300 million. As amazing as that news might be, there was one part that had me puzzled.

B&N College, the division that operates 600 plus college bookstores, was also being bundled into Newco (the working name for the new spinoff). I thought B&N College was just a retailer, so it was a little strange to see it included in a tech company.

But then I came across a post by Rob Reynolds, the Director of MBS Direct Digital. Rob is an old friend, and he pointed out that NookStudy, B&N’s hot textbook app, was actually developed by B&N College in a completely separate effort from the Nook platform. I followed up on this elsewhere and I got confirmation that NookStudy was a separate project.

NookStudy launched in mid-2010, so the development happened in 2009. B&N had bought B&N College by that point, and it was also building the Nook platform. But apparently B&N College was allowed to do its own thing and that included all the market research, testing, and development work needed to launch a textbook app. In fact, their website mentions that they’re still doing original development work (although the ebook stuff is now concentrated in the Nook division.)

This detail is new to me but it explains a lot. NookStudy isn’t terribly compatible with the Nook platform. It offers  a lot of annotation options but very little  of it will also show up in the Nook apps. I’ve always wondered about that.

In case it’s not clear by now, the new spinoff is most likely to be some kind of entry into the academic digital content market.

Note that I’m not saying digital textbooks, B&N already has that in NookStudy. B&N College is likely doing something new that warrants inclusion in the spinoff. (And no, that wasn’t clear right away; at first glance it looked like a poorly conceived reorganization.)

While B&N College isn’t doing ebook software development, they could have something else in the works. I don’t know what it is but it’s bound to be something interesting and it’s a near certainty that B&N College was included for reasons other than it was a college bookstore retailer.

My guess would be collaboration of some kind, but in any case I look forward to finding out.

It looks like that Digitimes rumor about Intel planning a tablet reference design was more than half true. Intel has just announced the StudyBook, a new 7″ tablet that they plan to release to the academic market later this year.

Intel’s going to offer this design to regional OEMs, much like it does with the ClassMate PC, an educational laptop design that Intel first introduced in 2008. That device is available from at least 3 vendors that I know of (US, Russia, South America), so it would seem likely that the StudyBook might be as widely distributed.

The StudyBook itself is going to run either Windows or Android 3.0 Honeycomb on Intel’s own 1.2GHz Atom Z650 CPU. Intel is predicting that it will cost around $200 when it ships.

The tablet has already gotten into then hands of some of the gadget blogs, and it looks like I was right when I predicted that Playskool assisted in the design. The Studybook has a thick white case with a black from and grey hand grips on the short sides. The length, width, and thickness are all noticeably higher than on your average 7″ tablet, which adds to the impression that it’s bulky and chunky. On the plus side, it is boasted as being spill and drop resistant.

Depending on what the OEMs do it it, this tablet could be offered with anywhere from 4GB to 32 GB Flash storage, cameras, 3G, Bluetooth, or a whole host of other options. I’m betting that the $200 price that I mentioned above won’t include most of those features; that base model will likely also run Android.

Intel wants this tablet to survive school kids, which would explain the think and rugged design. But I’m not completely sure that was necessary. The thing is, I know several people who have done 1:1 programs with tablets. No on ever reported that the standard consumer models weren’t sturdy enough for classroom use. Sure, they all bought cases to protect the tablets, but whoever buys the Studybook will probably also buy a case.

I’m also not sure how good of a value the low end Studybook  will be. By the time it hits the market you’ll be able to get an Android tablet twice as good for the same price. What’s more, that other tablet will probably be able to best the Studybook in battery life as well as performance.

Specs

• 7″ capacitive XGA screen (1024×60)
• 1.2GHz Intel Atom Z650 CPU
• 1GB RAM
• 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB Flash storage
• Optional VGA (front) and 2MP (rear) cameras
• microSDHC card slots
• Optional mini-HDMI and SIM card slots
• Wifi, optional 3G and Bluetooth
• Speaker & mike
• Up to 5.5 hours battery life
• 8.1? x 5.3? x 0.65?
• 1.2 pounds

Press Release

From Classrooms to Playgrounds: An Intel® Studybook is a Student’s Rugged Window to the World

Intel® Learning Series Expands Product Portfolio

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
– An Intel® studybook, a ruggedized, purpose-built tablet for education, provides mobility for students, comes with Intel® Learning Series (Intel® LS) software suite and is supported by a broad education ecosystem
– The Learning Series has added Teacher PC criteria for Ultrabook™ and Notebook systems- enabling a seamless classroom experience
– Currently, more than 7 million students worldwide are using Intel classmate PCs

SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 10, 2012 – Intel Corporation today introduced an Intel® studybook, a tablet that is part of the Intel Learning Series family and features unique classroom-ready features and capabilities including an ultra rugged design and specialized educational software. Purpose-built for 1:1 e-learning, a studybook’s innovative features include front and rear cameras, microphone, light sensor support project-based inquiry and mobile learning environments. It comes with a capacitive multi-touch LCD screen and is based on an Intel® Atom™ processor Z650.

The rugged tablet reference design is constructed from a single piece of plastic and includes shock-absorbers around the screen. It is designed to withstand accidental drops from a standard student desk and is also water- and dust- resistant. Young students, often owners of slippery fingers can learn and have fun in and out of the classroom with reduced stress for parents and teachers concerned about damage.

An Intel studybook provides education-focused solutions with a student-friendly design. The education software includes classroom management, LabCam applications that support scientific enquiry, and an optimized ereader. The collaboration software has a user-friendly interface which enables teachers and students to collaborate in the classroom for improved learning efficiency.

"An Intel studybook offers students limitless opportunities to enhance their learning experience." said Kapil Wadhera, general manager of Intel’s Education Market Platform Group. "Expanding the Intel Learning Series portfolio of affordable, purpose-built educational devices brings us closer to our vision of enabling more students and teachers to participate in high quality education."

Teachers are an integral part of the classroom and the new Intel Learning Series Teacher PC criteria will enable solutions that are developed specifically to meet the needs of teachers. The criteria are available to computer manufactures to build purpose built education notebooks and Ultrabooks™ for teachers and will take advantage of the 500 member strong Intel Learning Series ecosystem. Teacher PCs also come with access to education content, professional development and digital literacy resources.

As a component of the Intel Learning Series family of products, an Intel studybook is grounded in ethnographic studies. The hardware and software elements of an Intel studybook have been piloted in more than 2,000 classrooms in 36 countries. Its infrastructure is tailored to individual geographies in terms of content, cultural relevance, and language.

About the Intel Learning Series
Intel® Learning Series brings together digital content, teacher training, deployment support and purpose-built education technology to enable successful 1:1 e-learning environments for students. Through a strong ecosystem of PC manufacturers, operating system vendors, education service providers, content and software providers, the Learning Series delivers complete end-to-end education solutions. More than 500 alliance members in 70 countries are developing applications, peripherals and services optimized for the Learning Series. More information available at www.intellearningseries.com.

A report has been released this week which took a look at Peru’s OLPC project. This project has little to do with ebooks, but the educational, sociological, and technological aspects are fascinating.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) commissioned a study (PDF) last fall which gathered info on 2 groups of schools in Peru, those with and without the new XO laptops. The researchers compared and analyzed the data and discovered that there was not a significant difference between the test and control groups.

While the students with the XO laptops showed a slight improvement, it was hardly the sea change that proponents of the program had predicted.

I came across the report in The Economist, and I’ll let them give the background on Peru:

Peru is enjoying an economic boom, but has one of Latin America’s worst education systems. Flush with mining revenues, the previous government embraced the laptop initiative. It spent $225m to supply and support 850,000 basic laptops to schools throughout the country. But Peruvians’ test scores remain dismal. Only 13% of seven-year-olds were at the required level in maths and only 30% in reading, the education ministry reported last month.

This report has a back story to it that I don’t think most people are aware of. For some time now there’s been a debate in the OLPC community over how the XO laptops should be deployed.

I’ve been following the discussions for a couple years now, and in all that time there have been 2 camps with different ideas on how to distribute the OLPC laptop. One is to simply give out the devices (parachute), and the other is to help a target country change their education system.

Nick Negroponte, founder of the OLPC non-profit and the man who is credited with the idea for the XO laptop, has long been an advocate for the parachute approach. He and others believe that you can simply give kids XO laptops and they will teach themselves. In fact, you might recall all the news from last fall when Negroponte proposed doing exactly that. He’s going to have pallets of the XO-3 tablet dropped by parachute into remote villages.

The other approach to distributing XO laptops is to also send in educational experts to help retrain teachers, principals, and students in better ways to use devices so the students will learn more. This approach requires an on the ground presence and is a lot more work, so it doesn’t have the appeal of the magic wand that is the parachute approach.

This debate has been going on since at least 2009, and while I don’t know if it has been resolved internal to the OLPC community, I suspect that the report from Peru is going to add heat to the fire. It would seem to me that this report disproves one of the approaches.

Two details I picked up from this report is that the investigators didn’t find any significant improvement in the rate at which students learned, nor did they see a major shift in how the teachers taught. This sounds to me like Peru, however inadvertently, went for the parachute approach. All they provided was the XO laptops (and tech support), but they didn’t try to change how teachers did their jobs. The devices were slotted into existing lesson plans and thus any benefit was minimized.

But there is one detail in the footnotes that might disprove my conclusion above. The vast majority of teachers who received XO laptops for their class also got 40 hours of training in how to use them in the classroom. Either the training wasn’t enough, or it covered the wrong material, because it didn’t appear to have had any effect.

I think the one time training still makes the Peru OLPC project an example of the parachute approach. There’s no indication in the report that the government of Peru put effort into continuing to share info with teachers after the initial training period was over. (I should point out, though, that I don’t have all the info on Peru project, just what is in this report.)

In any case, what we see in this report is that the tech that the gov’t of Peru distributed to the schools isn’t being used effectively (never mind why). That’s a pity, because it’s something that could have been prevented. The effective use of technology in the classroom is a heavily studied topic. You just have to know who to talk to.

A few weeks back I attended CoSN, a high level policy conference on tech in schools. One of the sessions I attended on the last day was given by Bernajean Porter, and she has been consulting with schools on with very issue for the past 5 years.  She’s worked out a system to classify how effectively schools are using the tech they have.  The whole thing is rather long, but it can be boiled down to 3 categories:

• teaching the tech
• using the tech to teach the same old lessons
• using the tech to come up with new ways to teach and new lessons to teach

When you explain to a student how to use a device, you are teaching the tech. When a student uses an XO laptop to type up a paper which they would have written out by hand last year, they’re using the tech to teach the same old lessons.

The true growth comes from the third category. Unfortunately for anyone enamored of the parachute approach, it requires a lot more work over a long period of time.

If you want to achieve academic improvement on the scale of the Peru OLPC project, it’s going to require a significant investment by the government in leading their educational system down a new path. That’s not something you can do in a single year or by simply deploying XO laptops to schools.

It’s also not pretty, but it is the only way to move forward.

image by One Laptop per Child

Safari Books Online, an early pioneer in distributing books and content online, just bought Threepress  Consulting, a current pioneer in distributing books and content online. Talk about fitting a round peg into a round hole. Liza said it best:

"Both companies have a mission to provide high-quality, cross-platform access to books in a model that benefits both readers and publishers. Safari provides us with an unparalleled reserve of content, sales team, marketing savvy, and publisher relationships. We’re bringing our focus on standards, accessibility, interactivity, and emerging technology. "

Safari Books Online was founded just over 10 years ago as a joint venture between O’Reilly and Pearson Education. It has since grown into one of the bigger and better on-demand digital libraries for technology, creative, business and management professionals. Its library now contains over 20,000 titles.

Safari hasn’t gotten much mention on this blog, but Threepress has. They’ve been getting attention for their several Epub and Epub 3 tools, and I’m mentioned Liza Daly once or twice when she has posted conference presentations on the Threepress blog.  These are the folks behind the Ibis Reader, a browser based Epub reading app that launched last year. Threepress is also responsible for creating and maintaining EpubCheck, the online Epub validator. But those are just 2 demo projects released byThreepress; they do much more.

As part of the acquisition, the Threepress staff will join the Safari Books Online engineering team and work from their East Coast and Bay Area offices. Threepress co-founders Liza Daly and Keith Fahlgren will head the engineering dept as VP of Engineering and Director of Engineering, respectively. The sale was complete on 1 January, and the terms have not been disclosed.

I’ve just come across an interesting side note for the XO-3 tablet news that broked a couple days back.

Marvell and OLPC announced in the same press release that the XO-1.75 laptop, which debuted at CES 2011, is going to ship in March. I wonder why they showed it off last year of they weren’t planning to ship it?

This is the newer model  that was redesigned in partnership with Marvell. It’s running on a 1GHz Marvell Armada system on a chip. The new CPU required a redesign of the mainboard, but other than that the 1.75 uses the same general hardware design as the previous XO laptops.

The previous models were based on x8 chips (like what OSX and Windows run on), so they weren’t terribly energy efficient. But the XO-1.75 uses only half the power so  it gets considerably better battery life. It’s so good that OLPC finally released the hand crank power supply option.

The base price is around $175, but that doesn’t include the the ancilllary costs like network equipment, service costs, and all the rest of the hardware needed to create an infrastructure to support a learning environment. Over 75 thousand units of the XO-1.75 have already been ordered by OLPC projects in Uruguay and Nicaragua.  These countries have been running OLPC projects for a couple years now, and they plan to use the new model to replace worn out units and expand their programs.

Do you know what I find odd about this? When OLPC talked about the XO-3 tablet, they said that it was going to replace the existing laptops including the XO-1.75. But now they’re going to be shipping this unit in March. I’m thrilled that they’re providing options (not everyone is going to want a tablet), but I do wish that they’d get all the PR people on the same page.

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Earlier today I showed you videos of the Kyobo eReader. If you looked carefully you could see that it has a front light on top of the screen. Like E-ink screens, that ebook reader needed a frontlight because it could not use a backlight.

Not too long after I posted that, my competition posted a video from FlexLight, a small tech company that has perfected a component that can be built in to any ereader and offer the same feature with a minimal energy cost.

Mirasol and Eink are low power screens, but to get the power level down they also gave up the ability to project light. This means that they can only reflect the light that hits the screen.

This is a neat component, but unfortunately it won’t do any of us much good. It has to be integrated into the device when it is built. And given how tight margins are in the ereader market, I’m not sure that manufacturers will want to increase prices so they can include a front light. And that goes double considering that cases with integrated lights are quite common on the market.

BTW, this isn’t the first front light that I have seen. It’s the best, but I have seen a front light on older PDAs, the HP 360LX, and an old tablet. Also, the Sony Reader PRS-700 had a frontlight. It was ugly and didn’t offer uniform light, but it did demonstrate the possibilities.

via TER

Have you seen Asus' next Android tablet? It’s not out yet, but the eeePad Transformer Prime is promising to be just as droolworthy as its predecessor.

The first early hands on video is now up on Youtube and the Transformer Prime looks as good as I expected. It keeps the 10″ screen found on the current Transformer, but virtually everything else has changed. The Prime is thinner, and it’s running on a quad core Tegra 3 CPU. The rear camera have been upgraded to 8MP and it now has LED flash. The front camera is still 1.2MP, though. Flash is also getting bumped, with the base model now sporting 32GB.

I’m watching the video, and I can see that a number of the ports and slots were moved around but not much else has changed. The Prime still has the HDMI out, microSD card slot,and headphone jack found on the current model. It also has a keyboard component, which is thinner than the one sitting on my desk but not fundamentally different.

Weight is down, but battery life is up. The Prime boasts 18 hours of runtime, compared to the 16 hours on the current Prime (with the keyboard attached). I usually got around 14 hours, which is pretty good for a netbook.

It’s due out in December, with a projected retail of $499. The keyboard costs extra, of course. You can pre-order it now from Best Buy, B&H, GameStop, and Tiger Direct. For Canadian customers, Future Shop and NCIX are accepting pre-orders.

If not for the fact that I am very happy with my eeePad, I would definitely get this one. The current eeePad is both one of the best netbooks and best Android tablets on the market. The next one is bound to be better.

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