[CarolynBG]

I'll try to make this succinct but it'll be long anyway, I fear.

Background: I'm a researcher with a small grant to give eReaders to 3rd graders to take home for a few months. <specific details of experiment I *think* not important at the moment; we are using Kindles which has some bearing on this question, but I think people using other eReaders may also have good ideas, so I'm putting this here, not in the Kindle section.>

We've determined the best way to do this is to have all the Kindles (16) registered to the same Amazon account so all can access the same eLibrary which will be populated with books I buy from Amazon appropriate to the age group, as well as appropriate free books from e.g. Gutenberg project (seems like a lot of those I can get straight from Amazon).

My understanding is that the default number of devices a book can be on is 6, with some exceptions. So, working with that, up to 6 kids can have a book "out" (on their kindle) at any time, and when they are done, they "delete" it from the Kindle, in effect "checking it back in" and making it available for another kid (if the book is even popular enough to have that many kids checking it out at once). (I will turn synchronization OFF so that multiple kids can read the same book.)

Per the school district rep and the principal, they prefer that the kids not be able to buy books themselves, therefore the kids won't be able to log on to the account except through me (I will make weekly or even biweekly visits to accommodate this).

I was thinking it might be nice to keep track of how many copies of a book are "checked out", and while I'm at it, keep a record of what the kids read, or at least checked out, for the purpose of our research. An additional thing that would be useful to track is a waiting list if a book is particularly popular, so that I check them out the the kids in the order they expressed interest in them.

I'm trying to figure out how to build a simple database to do that. Would something in excel be sufficient? Does anyone know of some simple (and not too expensive) software (mac preferable, can do Windoze; would Filemaker Bento work for this?) that might keep track of these things? I've been searching these pages and not found anything here that quite answers my question. (or it is over my head: I keep reading about mobi and calibre and so forth, and I don't know anything about those; I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible -- just get the book from amazon, download it to a kid's kindle, remove it when they are done. I'm not going to go looking for stuff I have to do lots of conversions on, etc. I just need to keep it simple so I can do the project with a minimum of fuss.)

IF I try something in excel (or bento), has anyone done that and have a template that works well that they are willing to share? I'm imagining I need either one page for the set of books, with an entry for each book and a column for each copy, then a page for the students with a list of what books they have out -- or would I need a page/record for each kid?

Thanks for any advice. Wish us luck!

Sincerely,
Carolyn B-G