Marco Arment (creator of Instapaper) has done a very nice comparison of the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and iBooks on the iPad. He’s comparing availability of content (books and periodicals) less usability of the various tools.

By the way, Instapaper on the iPad is an incredible way to read articles that you’ve stored there. It caches the articles so they can be read offline and has many of iBooks’ reading features like type size and face control and more.

Isaacson’s essay in the issue of Time Magazine coming out tomorrow includes this quote:

A few weeks ago, I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant. We talked about his childhood, and he gave me some pictures of his father and family to use in my biography. As a writer, I was used to being detached, but I was hit by a wave of sadness as I tried to say goodbye. In order to mask my emotion, I asked the one question that was still puzzling me: Why had he been so eager, during close to 50 interviews and conversations over the course of two years, to open up so much for a book when he was usually so private? “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.

[via Macrumors.com]

You can borrow Kindle books from more than 11,000 libraries in the United States to read on any generation Kindle device, free Kindle app, or in your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader. Public library books for Kindle provide the same unique features as Kindle and Kindle books, including Whispersync technology that synchronizes your notes, highlights and last page read, real page numbers, and more. This feature will become available to libraries nationwide in the coming days.

This is a very big deal. Amazon is really on to something here.

Simply put, Michael Hart was the first to get what both Google and Amazon and Apple now get: having books in digital form, while not a total replacement for paper, allows a different kind of use of the material: searching, text to speech, and more.

I met Michael many years ago at a conference and as his obituary alludes to, he was an odd fellow. No doubt some of his oddities including his frugality prevented Project Gutenberg from taking off the way it might have. But, to be fair, Michael founded Project Gutenberg in the days of dial up modems before there was a world wide web so it was always a bit geeky.

I still have a folder on my computer with a nice collection of eText, downloaded from Project Gutenberg in the 1980s. I put together a disk of eText that I’d give away at conferences telling teachers and students that if they’d copy the books and documents (the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc.) onto their computers, they could get MacinTalk or its equivalent in the MS DOS/Windows world to read it. This was a great thing for many people with reading problems and while text to speech is much better now and an entire library fits on a small flash memory device, Michael was the pioneer that got us started.

[via Daring Fireball]

Help your children learn to read with the new read-aloud feature included in select children’s books from the iBookstore. The read-aloud feature uses a real narrator to read the book to you, and in some books, it will even highlight the words as you read along.

This is incredible news, not just for people who have a hard time with reading but also for people who are learning English as a second language and (hopefully in the future) for excellent readers who want to give their eyeballs a break.

[via Edward McKeown]

Here’s Laura Miller’s post at Salon: Book owners have smarter kids.

While I’m not sure I see how being exposed to books can make one smarter, exposure to books can certainly make one more literate, worldly, comfortable with print material and seemingly if not actually educated (different from smarter).

If you happen to be comfortable in bookstores or libraries — if you’ve been to them many times before and know what to expect, what you want and where to find it, or if you know whom and how to ask and feel entitled to bother the staff with your questions — it can be difficult to appreciate how intimidating these institutions of print culture can seem to someone who has little or no acquaintance with them.

This is very true and as someone with a reading disability I can tell you that the thought of walking into a library and not understanding the card catalog and having to ask for help kept me out of libraries. However, once card catalogs went electronic and I could use them on my own I started to use libraries more. I still had a hard time reading, but at least I could find what I then struggled to read.

I think there’s also a class issue built into this that is self-perpetuating: people with education have books, TV, computers, and lots of ways of dealing with information in the house for kids to use. People with less education might have fewer tools available relying more on TV than books.

At the end of his comment Patrick asks:

I wonder how electronic books and iPads would factor in to a future study like this. Does being surrounded, physically, by walls with shelves of books play any role in shaping a child’s perspective? Or is it simply the access to literature that’s important?

One needs both: the physical World Book to thumb through and an iPad with an electronic version along with wikipedia. It’s a matter of familiarity: if one is familiar with books, how they work and how to use them then they’re one more tool for finding things out and when the iPad doesn’t cough up what one wants one can go to the book shelf, or, the iBook shelf.

A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions

I saw a tweet from The New York Times this morning and I followed it. It was a wonderful little op/ed by Andy Selsberg called “Teaching to the Text Message” on the value of concise writing, a more positive look at writing in the age of 140 character limits. I was going to add it to instapaper, re-tweet it, and maybe write a blog post about it (add my opinion to the mix) with a link back to it. I thought about the new subscription model noted above and thought:

1. My own personal NY Times counter will start clocking my visits and revisits

2. How many people who will follow a re-tweet of mine or follow a link on this blog will have a subscription to the Times, or, if they don’t, will pause as they consider whether they want to follow my link and add to their NY Times view count (up to 20 free, after that pay)?

The fact that I paused to rethink pointing people to New York Times content because of their subscription model reminds me of the fact that over the years I’ve been pointing people at their content, many folks can’t get to content because of login issues. Even I can’t get to their content at times because their site forgets who I am (I have an account with them).

I’ve had enough.

New York Times editor Bill Keller’s odd thoughts on aggregation were and are telling. The New York Times, at least its management, is living in some kid of bubble, maybe breathing a bit too much of their own exhaust. I think The New Yorker magazine is too. Neither has found a graceful way to make money from online content while in fact, they both have the potential to do so because they have great content loved by large numbers of readers all over the world.

The clumsiness of their struggles are telling and add to the idea that both institutions are elitist. I don’t think of them that way (content-wise) but the way they protect their content seems out of step with the rest of the online world.

I appreciate print publications’ struggle to figure out how to make money in a world where the expectation is that if it’s online its free, but The New York Times’ various experiments in making money leave me cold and I won’t bite. I’ll find other news sources before I get entwined in their confusing pay schemes.

When Salon invented “Salon Premium,” their subscription model, I bit on it as it was simple and it worked. When flickr offered “Pro” accounts I signed up for 5 years because it was simple and it was a great deal given what the service offered me.

In a world where people make real money selling 99 cent apps one would think that the geniuses over at The NY Times could come up with a subscription model that made them money and was reasonable for their online readership.

Right off the top of my head: $25 a year, single login for any number of devices. $50 family/household rate for up to 5 users under a single roof (like Apple’s Family Pack). If it gets gamed, don’t sweat it. Enough people will bite to make them serious money.

I’m not hopeful and in the end, the clumsiness of this paywall scheme will hurt The New York Times more than it helps them.

The Boingboing post is an excerpt from the book Losing Control Finding Serenity: How the Need to Control Hurts Us And How to Let It Go by Daniel A. Miller.

Amazing to find this on Boingboing the same day I post my tips for students, teachers and parents. Looks like a must read in this age of helicopter parents and a world mad by competition and popularity.

Victoria never played soccer herself, but she became an avid fan of the sport in a short amount of time. Soccer brought out Victoria’s competitive spirit. When her twelve-year-old son, Tim, made the all-star AYSO team, Victoria was only too happy to take him to the two weekday practices and the weekend games. Tim loved playing, and he worked hard to improve his game. He was making steady progress, but this was not fast enough for Victoria. In her mind, Tim was not trying hard enough. She believed that he needed to be more aggressive to reach the “next level.” Nothing irked her more than to see another player beat her son to the ball.

And so Victoria, ever the controller, constantly pushed Tim to be more aggressive on the field. Her shouts could be heard above everyone else’s. Tim complained to his mom that she was distracting him during the game. But this didn’t deter her. During one important tournament game, Victoria loudly criticized Tim in front of the other parents for backing off some bigger opponents. Tim was so embarrassed that he walked off the field crying, right in the middle of the game. He told Victoria he didn’t want to play anymore.

If reading isn’t your thing and you like your life lessons with some sugar on them, consider the Ron Howard movie Parenthood, a classic.

This makes perfect sense: Kindle’s price has been dropping at a consistent rate since its introduction and at the rate the price is dropping it will be free November, 2011. Whether or not that target date is reached or that its absolutely free, it seems like a great idea to turn it into a loss leader to serve up Amazon’s content.

This is less about lack of success of the Kindle (it’s successful), more about how it fits into Amazon’s big picture as a content viewer.

It would be like Apple deciding to make iPods free knowing that the only way one could get content on them was buying it from iTunes.

[via Kottke.org]

Fascinating piece with graphs on the reading habits of people who are consuming at least some of their reading material on computers and hand-held devices and using services like Instapaper and Read it Later to time-shift when they read things they find. The study is from Read it Later.

The flood of content disrupts us all day as if we have an maniacal paperboy throwing new editions on our doorstep every 15 seconds.

Yep, that’s about it.

I’ve been using Instapaper for a while now to save things I want to read later after the paperboy settles down or I get tired of picking up new papers, many times on my iPad.

When a reader is given a choice about how to consume their content, a major shift in behavior occurs. They no longer consume the majority of their content during the day, on their computer. Instead they shift that content to prime time and onto a device better suited for consumption.

Initially, it appears that the devices users prefer for reading are mobile devices, most notably the iPad. It’s the iPad leading the jailbreak from consuming content in our desk chairs.

And this is one of the important reasons I do not want to get another desktop computer: I don’t want the “best” computer in the house to be a magnet holding me in my office chair. I know this is a fallacy because I can collect things to read all day on the iMac and read it later on the iPad in a comfortable chair, but somehow I’m worried that won’t happen with me. Odd worry but there it is.

[via minimalmac]