Monthly Archives: November 2010

e-book, kindle

Kindles are wonderful things

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Though we know books are wonderful things they do have a few disadvantages.

They are heavy! Okay carrying a single book is probably okay for most people, but think about carrying all the books in a bookshelf? Yes not a practical solution to carry them all in one go!

You have to buy books, either from a book store or Amazon. Regardless of the route you take it will still take time to either find and buy the book in a bricks and mortar store, or wait for Amazon to deliver it. I have bought books from Amazon.com and it takes weeks for them to be delivered from the USA unless I am willing to pay an arm and a leg for speedy delivery.

Of course if you don’t buy the book, you can always borrow from your local library. Well you could borrow from your library under two assumptions. First that they have a copy, second that no one else has borrowed it. Yes you can request a copy or reserve a copy, but once more that takes time. In academic libraries the problems of scarce real books can impact on the learning process. I recall from my undergraduate days when as soon as a lecturer mentioned a book in a lecture as “essential reading” the entire cohort of students would literally run to the library to get out the single copy available… The library did sometimes under the direction of the academics add the book to a “special collection” that allowed the book to be borrowed for one hour! No more, just one hour! The focus moved away from learning and onto book borrowing and logistics!

One advantage given to paper books is the ability to highlight words or phrases, annotate sections of interest or fold over the corner to bookmark a page. This is fine if this is your book, but can change how someone views the content of the book if they use a book that already has annotations and bookmarks. Their view will be skewed by the previous reader. Also if you annotate or bend pages of a library book then the librarians rightly get a little upset.

If you talk to lost property offices at railway stations and airports you will realise that people lose books all the time. Once lost, the only way to retrieve that book is to buy a new copy.

Finally though for many, books are an accessible format, for some the small text and black on white printing can be inaccessible.

The e-book reader is a technological solution to some of the issues we face with real paper books. There are many models out there from the new Sony Reader with touch interface, the Nook and the well received Amazon Kindle. These e-ink devices allow you to read books anywhere and at anytime, well under the assumption it isn’t dark!

You can put onto these devices an entire library of books. The Kindle is only 241 grams (8½ oz.) so weighs less than a single paperback book, but can be loaded with three and a half thousand books.

The Kindle (and now some other e-book readers) allow you to buy and download books over wifi or 3G without needing a computer and without needing to wait for delivery. A single click and the book is there in almost an instant ready to read. You can also download sample chapters, try before you buy. Well you can do that in a bookshop, but I find the shop assistants always look at me weirdly. In my local book shop, which has a coffee shop inside, has put up notices asking customers not to take books from the shelves into the café area and read them whilst drinking coffee.

Some educational institutions are now providing learners with a Kindle and filling it with the requisite text books, literally providing them with a library on the move. Libraries that use e-book readers, no longer need to guess how many physical copies of a core text will be needed they can provide copies on demand as and when needed. Many e-book readers like the Kindle, allow you to highlight, annotate and bookmark an e-book. However these can be easily removed if you are using a borrowed e-book reader from the library for example.

If you lose your Kindle, you’ve not lost your library. You can replace your Kindle and then re-download your library to the device.

In terms of accessibility, the ability to change text size and contrast on e-book readers ensures that they are more accessible than paper versions. The Kindle also has a text to speech capability, though it has to be said, some publishers do not allow their books to be read in this way, they would I guess prefer you buy the audiobook version.

Having said all that e-Book readers are not there to replace books, they enhance and enrich the reading experience. Just because I have a Kindle doesn’t mean that I am never going to read another paper book again! Far from it, I suspect that reading sample chapters on the Kindle will probably result in purchasing the paper version… likewise though I will admit I can see myself clicking the “buy” link now and again.

e-Books also have a few disadvantages in that once I have purchased a copy of an e-book, it is nigh on impossible to lend that copy to a friend… it is impossible to donate the e-book to the local Oxfam shop… it is impossible to impress your friends as you can with a books on the coffee table or the bookshelf when they come to visit…

e-Book readers, like the Kindle are wonderful things, but still, the iPad is the future of reading…

A version of this article originally appeared on the FOTE10 website.

app of the week, ipad

Lights, Camera, Capture! – iPad App of the Week

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Lights, Camera, Capture! – iPad App of the Week

This is a regular feature of the blog looking at the various iPhone and iPad Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive. Though called iPhone App of the Week, most of these apps will work on the iPod touch or the iPad, some will be iPad only apps.

This week’s App is Lights, Camera, Capture!

Lights, Camera, Capture! for iPad is based on the popular book by Bob Davis. Like the book, it helps aspiring photographers learn to achieve the best possible images with minimal lighting equipment. The app features over 100 videos, compelling interactive diagrams to help you understand the effect of lighting and equipment settings, workshop videos, high resolution images, and the full text of the original book, integrated seamlessly.

The author is a professional photographer whose high-profile clients include Oprah Winfrey and Eva Longoria Parker, and whose work has appeared in Time, O, and People magazines. Along with his invaluable advice, this beautiful and engaging app includes hundreds of video clips with Bob teaching you how to see the light so you can achieve studio-quality images in any situation. He covers the elements of lighting, shows his lighting setups, and shares his two-strobe technique that lets you create studio-quality lighting anywhere with minimal equipment.

The title includes incredible interactive exhibits to help you understand the effect of f-stop settings, lighting positions, light strength ratios and more.

This book covers and includes:
* Professional tips and stunning full-color images
* All the key elements of photographic lighting, with informative illustrations and lighting grids
* The author’s pioneering two-strobe technique
* The relationship between aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and the effects of different lenses
* Tips on how to achieve studio-quality lighting outside the studio
* Videos from the author’s three-day lighting and photography workshop
* Author commentary on his photography and how he captures his images

Note that video streaming requires an active Internet connection.

£5.99

In many of my previous blog posts and presentations I have given over the last year, I have written and spoken about how devices such as the iPad will allow books, magazines and newspapers to evolve. To provide a different and more enhanced reading experience.

One publisher I have mentioned before is Inkling. Lights, Camera, Capture! is the first of their “books” I have downloaded and looked at. Unlike their Inkling App, this book is a standalone App, however it is also available within the Inkling App too.

So how does the reading experience shape up?

Well like any good book, it has an index, making it very easy to find different chapters and sections within those chapters.

You can highlight sections, access a glossary, make notes, add bookmarks and see where you have been. Now you can do some of that with a printed book, however this iPad version allows you to do some of it quicker and smarter.

Not all good news, though as every time I tried to add a note it crashed the App on one of my iPads, however I could get it to work on the other!

As you might expect with a book on photography there are a fair few photographs. With virtually all of these you can click on them to make them larger, but not that much larger!

There are also videos of Bob Davis explaining how he took particular shots. Now this is where I think they missed a trick. These videos are very simple video clips (well the ones I watched and I have not read the whole book at this time). They are simply Bob in front of a computer screen explaining how he took the shot. Personally I would have liked to have seen him taking the actual shot, where the camera actually was, the lighting, models, etc… All I actually get is a talking head, a diagram and the actual photograph.

Or are videos of presentations from workshops, where the quality is quite poor in terms of what you can see and hear.

In other words it doesn’t add much to the experience of reading, it becomes listening, rather than watching and understanding. The reason you use video in a book is not to duplicate what is written, but to enhance and enrich what is written to improve understanding.

I am also surprised that the videos are online and not part of the App, I am surprised as the app is in excess of 300MB in size, which is huge, and I thought this was down to the videos, it isn’t! So if you are not on wifi or want to watch your 3G data limits, then this App may not be as good as you thought it might be.

As for the actual written content? Which is the main reason for buying such a book.

Well I have learnt a fair bit about various things, especially lighting that I didn’t know (and I do take a fair few photographs).

However I think it could be a lot better, as I said above, don’t just have a talking head, use the power of video to show and explain how to do things that are difficult to explain in just text or with diagrams. It would have been nice to see more interactive diagrams to show the impact of changing lighting, exposure or aperture. This is something again which is difficult to explain with plain diagrams in my opinion. There were some, but not as many I would like.

So is it value for money, well the print version of the book has a RRP of £29.99 though you can get it on Amazon for £15.00. So for £5.99 I do think this is value for money compared to the print version.

Overall, a good first attempt at an enhanced book, but in my opinion it could be so much better than it is.