E-readers in the Classroom more

£ftm5 FORMATIONS VOLUME XXII NUMBER 1 Spring 2011 | Summer 2011 editors Jacqueline Ellis and Ellen Gruber Garvey New Jersey City University managing editor Kathy Potter New Jersey City University art director Ellen Quinn New Jersey City University acknowledgments We would like to thank Jo Bruno, Vice President of Academic Affairs at NJCU; Barbara Feldman, Dean of Arts and Sciences at NJCU; and Gary Gordon, Website Developer and Designer at NJCU, for their support and assistance. Transformations is indexed in Alternative Press Index, EBSCO, Feminist Periodicals, Gender Watch, Gay and Lesbian Abstracts, MLA International Bibliography, and Sociological Abstracts. The journal is also available via ProQuest and Wilson web subscription databases. cover art Dip the Right One (detail) Adobe Illustrator Robert L. Nelson art pages 2 & 3 Dip the Right One (detail) Adobe Illustrator Robert L. Nelson cover design Ellen Quinn COPYRIGHT © New Jersey City University All rights reserved; no reproduction without permission. ISSN: 1052-5017 spring 201 i summer 201 i 133 media essay E-READERS IN THE CLASSROOM Phillip Barron With the United States' largest online retailer Amazon announcing that it now sells more ebooks than print books, and the nation's largest book retailer Barnes and Noble releasing a new model of its ebook reader (also called e-readers) every six to eight months, it is hard not to be convinced that the future of the book is electronic. By partnering with other corpo- rations such as Google and open-access, contributor-run digital libraries and archives (such as iBiblio.org and Project Gutenberg), Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook currently make available for display the text of more than two million books. Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica recently announced that it plans to develop and sell its own e-reader model which, priced competitively with the Amazon Kindle, will arrive pre-loaded with more than one thousand classics (Munoz). Although new models of e-readers do nothing to improve Jane Austen's wit,Toni Morrison's prose, or Aeschylus' drama, marketing mate- rials for each new model suggest that technological enhancements make possible a more immersive reading experience. In the welcome letter issued with the third generation Kindle, the online retailer's e-reader device, Amazon ceo Jeff Bezos states that the "top design objective was for Kindle to disappear in your hands—to get out of the way—so you can enjoy your reading." E-readers are electronic devices displaying digital texts such as books, portable document format files (pdfs), word processing documents, and a variety of other text formats. Designed to make text readable over sustained periods of time, e-readers such as the Kindle, Nook, and Sony's Reader models use e-Ink technology. In contrast to a backlit screen such as a com- puter monitor, c- Ink screens emit no radiation and intends to achieve .1 level of text clarity and readibility analogous to paper. While ebook and e-reader adoption has been slower in academia than in the general public, Christine Borgman argues in Scholarship in the Digital Age that academia's continued use of print books and journals "reflects scholarly practices rather than a rejection of technological capabilities per se" (187-188). Ebooks have suffered a rocky start with academics due to their non- standard methods of marking a reader's progress in a text (Rae). Because the font can be resized according to the reader's preference, enlarging and reflowing the text on the e-reader's screen, the number of pages in an ebook becomes meaningless. Amazon's Kindle has tried to standardize progress through the text using both locations and percentages (e.g. I am currently 67% of the way through Mario Vargas Llosa's La Fiesta del Chivo). Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship <iml Pedagogy | Volume xxii Number I http://web.iijcii.edu/sices/transforniatioiis published semi-annually by New Jersey City University 134 trans formations A location is anchored to the text so that no matter what size font the reader chooses, locations note identical places in the text. At location 771- 76 in the Kindle User's Guide, locations are described as "the digital answer to page numbers... with locations, you return to the same place every time regardless of the text size." Amazon s Kindle locations, while problematic because they are pro- prietary and thus inaccessible to users on other e-readers, have a precedent. While some technical analysts have "have described this system as being similar to the way the Bible is divided into chapters and verses," Kindle locations are more similar to the Bekker numbers used by Aristotle schol- ars to reference, for example, that the philosopher's discussion of friendship begins at location 1155a in the Nicomachean Etliics. The utility of locations for cross platform comparisons, however, will depend on ebook file-type standardization. Rather than standardize a numeric system of reference for electronic books, academics and etext publishers may instead devise a new citation system. Page numbers and citation styles are practices standardized by the governing bodies of professional fields for the purpose of reliably identifying attributions. But if electronic text search functions allow the reader to locate cited passages via a few keystrokes, page numbers may no longer serve the same purpose. Academics in the humanities recognize many advantages digitized text offers over print, such as text mining, algorithmic searching, concept map- ping, and for those who are digitizing texts, optical character recognition (OCR), But these benefits are accessible only on computers with powerful processors and good interface devices. Since these features are not accessible on dedicated e-readers, these devices simply function for consuming tex- tual information. Michael Winter, Bibliographer for the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at the University of California at Davis offered an undergraduate course on the history of the book. In his 2011 seminar, students expressed concern "that the book as a physical object might dis- appear" in their lifetimes (Winter). In the final meetings of the quarter, the class looked at "display issues, navigation issues, and issues of [visual] con- trast" on the Amazon Kindle. Although students appreciated the ease with which linear search functions enhanced their ability to revisit a passage, they reported difficulty browsing texts, the digital equivalent of flipping through pages of a bound, printed book. Despite the manufacturers' pro- duction of new models of e-readers, Winter's class findings match those reported by students who participated in a pilot program aimed at reduc- ing paper consumption at Princeton University two years earlier. In fall 2009, Princeton partnered with Amazon to issue Kindles to fifty students in three classes. Project managers from the university's office of information technology loaded each e-reader with the materials students would be required to read over the course of the semester. While the proj- ect accomplished its goal of reducing paper consumption (student partici- pants reduced the amount of paper they used to print course readings by almost fifty percent), "about 65% of the participants in the pilot said they phillip barron 135 would not buy another e-reader now if theirs was broken" (Cliatt). Students in Princeton's e-reader pilot suggested that e-reader designers and manu- facturers need to improve highlighting and annotating functions, folder structures (for grouping similar texts), and text navigation functions to make e-readers more compatible with the demands of academic reading. Six other colleges and universities took part in the Amazon Kindle pilot program: Reed College, Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, the University of Washington, and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Students at each of the schools noted the lack of text annotation features as the most significant hurdle to using e-readers for academic purposes. Specifically, while the Kindle is able to display pdf documents, "much of the devices functionality is lost: annotation, highlighting, text-resizing, text-to-speech, and other fea- tures are unavailable" (Marmarelli). Reed College students enrolled in a lit- erature course found that "without the ability to open and switch between different windows, it was vritually impossible to navigate smoothly between multiple texts" (Marmarelli). Students at Case Western Reserve also were frustrated by the inability to "flip" through a book, what the university's Instructional Technology and Academic Computing office calls "random searching" (Mentch).Two years have passed since this pilot study, and in the interim the only improvement made to the Amazon Kindle which addresses students' concerns is the addition of folders for grouping like books within the Kindles navigation system. pdf presentation remains as awkward as it was in 2009, and given academia's investment in pdf documents for assigned readings, this remains one of the most significant hurdles to greater e-reader adoption in the higher education classroom. The Kindle features that drew the most praise from students at Case Western included the built-in dictionary, the device's storage capacity, its portability, and its ability to connect wirelessly to the Kindle store for downloading books and receiving documents by email. Reed College stu- dents also enjoyed the Kindles ability to wirelessly download reading materials. The college's professors, however, described a "single-function benefit." Faculty noted that "use of the Kindle in class did not lead to the distractions that are typical of laptop use. Students were not tempted to check their email, browse the web, or use the Kindle in class for anything except to refer to course materials" (Maramelli). Paper is not the only possible savings to be leveraged from using e-read- ers; on average ebooks cost less to produce and less to the consumer than their bound, printed counterparts. Often it is possible to download ebooks of texts in the public domain for less than one dollar a piece. Many are available for free. So when I recently audited a comparative literature course, I used an e-reader for as many texts as were available in electronic format. Compared to the purchase prices for the bound, printed books that most students used, I saved a total of $23.85 (not factoring in the cost of the e-reader itself). With that savings, I was able to purchase ebooks of two supplemental texts, one of which was the original-language version of a 136 trans format ions reading assigned in English translation. I was the only person in the class using an e-reader, although a few students read ebooks and PDFs on their laptops. When I could not obtain the identical translation in an ebook edi- tion, I read the print edition. But I paid the hidden cost of using ebooks to complete the courses reading assignments when, with three weeks remaining, my e-reader lost all of the notes, highlights, and annotations I had made in the texts. After troubleshooting a problem where books would not sync properly between my computer and an e-reader, I turned on the e-reader to find all of my books had been deleted from its storage media. With customer support, I was able to restore the books to my e-reader. However, the books loaded on the device as "new" and without all the notes, annotations, and highlighted passages. This loss of data represented the notes and comments from more than a thousand pages of text read over the previous three months. Digital storage media offer the convenience of bundling innumerable books into one device. But as we accumulate texts, notes, bookmarks, and supplementary documents in one place, if this data is stored in only one medium, we elevate the risk of catastrophic loss of information. If "five- hundred-year-old book papers [can] remain strong and flexible," as Nicholson Baker argues in Double Fold, then paper is a remarkably resilient medium for storing information (7). To drop a book from a height of five feet onto a hard surface might dent the corner of a few pages or stress the binding of the codex. To drop a hard drive under similar conditions could lock the platters which store the data, rendering the hard drive unusable. To drop a dedicated e-reader under the same conditions could crack the screen and leave text inaccessible. To avoid the catastrophic loss to which digital storage is prone, using an e-reader should be supplemented with a regular backup routine. Universities could address information technology concerns like online backup and data security if they lent institutional sup- port to students and faculty using dedicated e-readers. In June 2010, the US Department of Educations Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice issued a joint memo to college and university presidents warning "it is unacceptable for universities to use emerging technology without insisting that this technology be accessible to all students," referring to disability access issues rather than economic accessibility. The federal government issued the letter in the wake of a law- suit in which "two national organizations representing the blind sued Arizona State University over its use of the Kindle" (Parry). In May 2011, the Office issued a memo and faq aimed at clarifying that the Department of Education encourages colleges and universities to experiment with emerging technology as long as those technologies meet accessibility guidelines. Joshua Hori, Assistive Technologist and co-chair of the Electronic Accessibility Leadership Team at UC Davis, explained to me by email that while many of the e-readers currently on the market have text- to-speech options for reading aloud the contents of an ebook, the Kindle and Nook both lack voice-enhanced navigation outside of each book. PHILLIP BARRON 137 They are considered inaccessible devices because it is not possible to nav- igate between books nor within the Kindle or Barnes and Noble stores, required for purchasing new books, without sight. Android and iOS tablet computers are currently the only electronic reading options considered accessible, but not even these can read aloud PDF documents. With the institutional help of a university's information technology office, PDFs can be converted to .epub or .pre formats, which preserve text-to-speech options for assigned PDFs, but as Reed College noted, "the conversion process required a significant amount of staff time to produce acceptable results, particularly for older articles that had to be scanned as image PDFs without optical character recognition" (Marmarelli). Although "almost all of the participants said they were interested in following the technology to its next stages, because they think a device that works well in academia would be worth having," current consensus is that there is no e-reader on the market ready for the unique demands of academic reading (Cliatt, see also "E-Reader Pilot"). Works Cited Baker, Nicholson. Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault 011 Paper. New York: Random House, 2001. Print. Borgman, Christine L. Scholarship in the Digital Age. Cambridge: MIT P, 2007. Google ebooks edition. Cliatt, Cass. "Kindle Pilot Results Highlight Possibilities for Paper Reduction." 22 Feb. 2010. Web. 20 May 2(m 1. http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/arcliive/S26/64/38E3S/index.xml Hori,Joshua. Personal communication. Email. 8 Jun. 2011. Marmarelli, Trina and Martin Ringle. "The Reed College Kindle Study." 26 Feb. 2010. Web. 15 Jun. 2011. http://www.reed.edu/cis/about/kindle_pilot/Reed_Kindle_report.pdf Mentch, Mace. "Amazon Kindle DX Pilot Summary of Results." Web. 14 Jun. 2011. http://www.case.edu/its/itac/content/assessment/images/kindle%20w hite%20paper-sumary.pdf Murioz, Ramon. "Telefonica se lanza al mundo editorial electronico." El Pat's. 1 Jun. 2011. Web. 7 Jun. 2011. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/tecnologia/Telefonica/lanza/mundo/ editorial/electronico/elpepu tec/20110607elpeputec_5/Tes Parry, Marc. "Inaccessible E-Readers May Run Afoul of the Law, Feds Warn Colleges." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 29 Jun. 2010. Web. 20 May 2011. http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredeampus/inaccessible-e-readers-may- run-afoul-of-the-law-feds-warn-colleges/25191 Rae,Tushar. "E-Books'Varied Formats Make Citations a Mess for Scholars." f/y7/75 FORMAT IONS The Chronicle of Higher lidiication. 6 Feb. 201 1 .Web. 20 May 2011. http://chronicle.com/article/E-Books-Varied-Formats- Make/126246/ The Trustees of Princeton University. "The E-reader Pilot at Princeton." 2010. Web. 20 May 2011. http://www.princeton.edu/ereaderpilot/ US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division and US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. Joint "Dear Colleague" Letter: Electronic Book Readers. 29 Jun. 2010. Web. 24 May 2011. http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague- 20100629.html US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. Frequently Asked Questions about the June 29, 2010, Dear Colleague Letter. 26 May 201 l.Web. 15 Jun. 2011. http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/dcl-ebook-faq- 201105_pg3.html Winter, Michael. Personal interview. 25 May 2011. SPRING 2011 | SUMMER 201 I 143 Contributors MELISSA BAILAR received her PhD in French Studies from Rice University. She is currently Associate Director of the Humanities Researc h Center at Rice and works as a researcher on the Our Americas Archive Partnership. She serves on the executive board of the South Central Modern Language Association and regularly writes and presents on nine- teenth- and twentieth-century French and Francophone literature and film. She also is the editor of "Emerging Disciplines," a collection of essays and proceedings from a fall 2009 symposium on research that crosses disci- plinary boundaries, and the author of an essay in the 2010 volume Teaching ami Studying the Americas. PHILLIP BARRON works as a digital history developer at the University of California, Davis. He received his MA in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and discovered the dig- ital humanities while working at the National Humanities Center, where he was managing editor of On the Human and coordinated the digital preservation of Soundings, a 400+ hour audio archive. He has published both articles and op-eds on philosophy and the digital humanities. His first book, The Outspokin' Cyclist, is a collection of newspaper columns written over a four-year period and will be published in July 201 1, and his poetry appears online and in print. MARY McALEER BALKUN is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Seton Hall University. She is the author of Tlie American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture, as well as articles on Phillis Wheatley, Sarah Kemble Knight, Walt Whitman, and American Gothic literature. She has also published articles and given numerous conference presentations on using technology for teaching and learning. Her current projects include a book-length study of the early American grotesque and the creation of video simulations in Second Life to support reading assignments in the university's core curriculum. AMI BLUE is a doctoral student in English at Michigan State University studying psychoanalytic trauma in American literature, film, and televi- sion. She currently teaches courses in Women and Gender Studies and has in the past taught composition, college orientation, and English as a sec- ond language. Her research projects concern how consent and permission are expressed through language and the roles of writing and reading liter- ature in trauma recovery BETTINA CARBONELL is Associate Professor of English, and Coordi- nator of the interdisciplinary Humanities and Justice Major, at John Jay College, CUNY. Her research focuses on issues of ethics and aesthetics in