Week 9, Thing #22 - Zoho

I will try Zoho writer again in writing this post.  Maybe this time I'll figure out how to have the emoticons upload along with the text.

I looked over the Project Gutenberg site and was taken with the idea that it was just 100 years ago that the hottest item was libraries with books that could be borrowed and read for free.  Now, 100 years later, there is this effort to provide free audio access to books for patrons to download.  I looked at the free children's literature in audio and of course, found that most of the audio books are quite old, and I'd never heard of many of them.  I assume that they can be recorded and offered online because the copyright on them has expired.  That will be the big difference between libraries offering free books and the Gutenberg offered free audios; books can be current and free to lend, audios most likely can't.  Nevertheless, it's a tremendous and valuable project and seems like a logical next step.

While at the Project Gutenberg site, I saw links to the Kindle, Amazon's new reading device.  I spent a tremendous amount of time really learning about Kindle.  I read about it and all it offers, I read customer reactions and watched the 3 videos that they have: Jeff Bezos talking about Kindle; Jeff Bezos being interviewed by Charlie Rose; and Toni Morrison telling of her experiences with Kindle.  I was pretty taken with Kindle.  Here are some of the things I liked about it: you can download a book anywhere because it uses cell phone technology, not the Internet; best sellers are $9.99; you can read the first few chapters for free, the high resolution screen looks like the pages of a book; it will keep your place when you turn it off; it only weighs 10 oz.; it holds 200 books; and there are 100,000 books available.   There are many other features that will appeal to people.  In listening to Bezos, he expects that in about 10 years, all books in all languages will be available on Kindle.  He feels that printing books "on dead trees" is in our future.  He is able to offer some features that books can't (e.g. linking vocabulary to a dictionary, having reviews available) and says that you have to play to the strengths of the new technology.  The interview is very interesting and I encourage you to watch it.  He doesn't discuss what will happen to libraries.  It still seems to me, that even at the low price of $9.99, many patrons still couldn't afford to buy all the books they might want to read, so there could still be a place for libraries providing free reading material.  But will we be lending out Kindles? 

So, will Kindle make it big - it just could happen.  But what about children's books with their many colorful illustrations (Bezos says color is coming to Kindle in about 3 years.)  Will book lovers be happy having their whole collection on Kindle - maybe.  On Tuesday, I'm leaving for a 2 month stay in Switzerland and the books I want to take are taking up quite a bit of room in my suitcase and I may have to leave some behind.  Right about now, I could go for a Kindle - but they're all sold out!