Ebooks in Education – Amazon Kindle

by dldamore

 

Below is a screenshot of a webpage Amazon.com has for a finance book that presumably is used in colleges and universities.

There are more sections of highlighted text on the page that are not shown in the screenshot. The Public Notes section has no notes. The readers, students, could write in notes for a section of text and their notes would be easy to see on their own Notes page on the Amazon site. Notes they make public would presumably appear in this text box.

Screen shot 2011 04 17 at 11 32 44 AM

What would be interesting is if it would be possible to join a group, think class or book club, to read and share notes with. This could engage students and readers more. If half the class highlighted some text it would probably be worth talking about in class.  The notes people write would enable a better discussion because reader recall would presumably be faster when text the person wrote was presented. The internal database of the mind would be faster for searching and synthesizing the thoughts and ideas of the book and passages.

Notes:

Link to the page for the book screenshot above. Perhaps more passages will be highlighted by the time you visit.

 

NYT: Grads squeezed by student loan burden – Business – U.S. business – The New York Times – msnbc.com

by dldamore

While many economists say student debt should be seen in a more favorable light, the rising loan bills nevertheless mean that many graduates will be paying them for a longer time.

via NYT: Grads squeezed by student loan burden – Business – U.S. business – The New York Times – msnbc.com.

 

What about the people that don’t graduate and have student loan debt?

IDEA – Business Week iPad App + Print

by dldamore

Was just reading a post on Tech Crunch about the new Business Week iPad app. One of the complaints was that the content of the app is updated once per week, just like a real magazine.

IDEA

Post all the writings of their talent in the app as it is completed. Then, based on the user data and feedback from the users of the iPad app, adjust what stories are featured in the magazine. This could be done with the top five articles that readers have rated highest. This could be highlighted in a page that explains what the stories are and where readers can find them in the magazine. Magazine readers may find this curation by the crowd to be of considerable value.

Notes

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have a similar feature in what published articles were most emailed, read or shared. Example links are below.

WSJ

NYT

People Loved The Flip

by dldamore

Earlier today Cisco announced it was shutting down their Flip division and that 550 people would be out of a job. Normally this would not be big enough news to generate the volume of conversation I’m seeing on Twitter. There must be something that the Flip really tapped into regarding people and their relationship with the Flip. Perhaps it has to do with strong branding, built on making a great product that was simple to use.

 

Signed by Author Ebooks?

by dldamore

Questions (for thought)

  1. What prevents ebooks from having special editions?
  2. Could there be a market for signed and limited editions for ebooks?

Answers

  1. Lack of imagination
  2. Yes. There is a market in there somewhere. Size is unknown and as far as I am aware no one is presently serving this market. Ebooks are a relatively new content distribution channel and have probably not hit the mainstream market yet.

Notes:

Possible example of 1 of 1000. Suggest using the limited edition total as being between 1 and 10% of expected sales. There would be some sort of price premium for the limited edition, but there could be other perks in addition to the satisfaction of having it.

Behind the cover in the ebook would be a special limited edition page that would have the edition number, EG: 147 of 1,ooo,  and a signature of the author.

Amazon Kindle Social Network?

by dldamore

 

ScreenClip(49)

Public Notes –  See image above. 4 people have this feature enabled

People can share their highlighted passages and written notes in the Kindle version of the book. This might be part of a reading club / social network.

  • Read book together.
  • Meet with other readers (people in your organized or not organized book club)
  • Discuss meaningful passages, notes and lessons.

There is a webpage where one can see all the highlighting one made in the book. There is also a page where some of the top highlighted passages are available. Here is the page for the book Content Rules. NOTE: This is an https URL. You might need to be logged in to Amazon to see it.

Attention Grabbing Ad

by dldamore

IMG00131-20110331-1332

Talk about an interruption ad. This one interrupts before you even have a chance to start reading the paper.

  • It got noticed
  • First reaction, this looks dumb, who would put an ad right on the product?
    • It was super simple to remove. +1
  • Whoever made the actual peal sticker marketing product seems to have done a good job.
    • Fast and easy removal is critical to not make the customer angry