They're Heeerrreeee

Our new Kindles have arrived! I spent much of yesterday unboxing them and playing around setting them up for use. These are the new models, priced at £89, significantly cheaper than the old style keyboard Kindle we trialed over the summer.

The first thing that struck me was the size.  With teeny tiny hands, I can hold the old Kindle in one hand, but not without stretching my fingers uncomfortably wide.

Plastic buttons a-plenty

Whereas with the new Kindle, it's narrow enough that my fingers wrap around it in a secure hold and I can even turn the pages without it being too uncomfortable.  This is excellent news.  As a librariany type this enables me to drink gin coffee, play with cats and organise things while reading.

Hmmm...

What's interesting about this is that since there is less space taken up with the sides of the device, the screen looks larger.  It isn't (I checked, with a ruler) but still. All the things that bugged me about our original Kindle have gone.  The horrible feel of the black textured plastic has been replaced with a sleek metallic finish, which also give you sense that it can stand up to knocks and bumps more securely.  The grippy effect plastic on the back has been made more tactile, though I worry that this is a surface that fiddling students will be able to scrape off with a fingernail.  Feels lovely though and removed the fear that the device is going to slip from your fingers. 

The hideous clicky keyboard buttons have gone! Using the cursor and the keyboard button is a little fiddly, but not bad.  My one criticism of this is that the keyboard layout is now alphabetical.  Why Amazon, why?  Querty works for a reason, and is all the more important when you're using a cursor to move from letter to letter.  It's worth is, for the lack of crap buttons, but it wouldn't have taken a massive leap of logic to at least give an option of keyboard layouts in the settings. 

And the sceensavers are nicer!

The page turn is faster, removing the need to blink slowly every time you click.  And the page turn buttons themselves have retained the pleasant directionality that the old model had, which minimises accidental page turns, but has lost the cheap, wobbly feel those buttons had.  It's now a secure, affirmative action which is far preferable.  So, what's missing?  The battery life is shorter, but still a month, which is fantastic.  There's less storage space, but still plenty and the reading aloud function has been removed.  Though this is surely a harsh blow for those with severe eyesight problems, the few times I used it, I found the harsh American accents hard to stomach and disliked the way that it tended to ignore clear punctuation markers for pauses and effect.  Luckily within school, our students with eyesight problems manage fine with enlargements, so the Kindle will still be useful to them, but in terms of accessibly, I think this is a step backward. 

We have ordered cases, but they're out of stock at the moment.  I'm wondering what sort of fixing they will use.  The old style Kindle had slots positioned in the side where the case attached, but the new model has nothing like this.  I'm really hoping that they haven't copped out with an elastic at the corners style fixing.  Will let you know when they arrive.  

These Kindles will be available for student use, based on which books they would like to read, i.e., if we only have an ebook version of a book, they will be offered that, with a Kindle, once a parental agreement form has been completed.  We'll need this to ensure that parents will be happy to replace any Kindles that are damaged or lost. Our budget won't stretch to any more!  We'll also be offering ebook loans to student's own devices.  This will be possible with some registering and de-registering, thoguh students will need to return at the end of their loan to 'return' the ebook and have it deleted, as DRM allows.   With the budget restrictions that we have, this I feel will be the true test of whether ebooks take off here.  With Christmas coming, dozens of students have said that they're requesting Kindles. Hopefully we will be able to have enough eventually that those who can't afford them can still have access to the full range of resources. 

Bridging the digital divide*.  Oh yeah. 

*In a predominantly middle-class school in a wealthy area where the school has valued libraries enough to fund the staffing and resources to run one.  I know.  We're like a tiny tributary of the larger dividing river.