need help managing my eLibrary with students

[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

[susan_cassidy]

If the kids can't buy books, then you have to de-register the Kindles after downloading books. They can't "update" the "check-out" count without re-registering, so that Amazon can "see" that the book is deleted. They can't download a book without being registered to an account, either. I'm thinking you won't be happy having to constantly register and de-register.

You may be able to control purchases by removing the credit card after initial registration, and adding gift cards as needed to purchase books, but if there is a gift card balance, any Kindle registered to the account will be able to purchase any book that costs less than or equal to the balance.

[CarolynBG]

Susan, thanks for replying so quickly.

Yeah, I've already been struggling with all those possibilities, ever since the school told me they thought it better if I controlled the purchases rather than letting the kids do it [this had been the grant-giver's original idea].

One thing I read on the Kindle forum is that there is a possibility of getting Amazon tech support to remove the wifi capability from the Kindles, and then the only way they'd be able to connect to the account is at the school with me, I think. (The school is internet-equipped; I'd log on to the account and then connect them via the usb cable.) This is what the school would prefer.

The other thing I'd been thinking is to indeed deactivate the university credit card unless I need to buy more books and then just attaching the credit card for the time needed; then they would not be able to buy anything even though they could browse (IF they even have wifi available at home; some of these kids will not even have computers at home much less wifi). I *think* this solution could work almost as well.

The final solution is simply tell the kids and their parents not to purchase books (and have them sign a [non-binding, of course] contract to that effect); I would get an email notice every time a book is bought by me or any other device, and if I see one bought that I didn't buy (unless it were to happen to be appropriate for this age group) I would delete it right away.

This last solution is obviously the least satisfactory solution IF they disregard my instructions to not buy books themselves, but I don't have many options other than these three or the first one you mentioned, which, as you say, would be a real pain. (I think decoupling/recoupling the credit card once or twice a week would be far less of a pain.)

Do you think either of my first two solutions (the second of which of course you also mentioned) will work? If you see any problems with those ideas, any ideas on how to do it better are very welcome.

Thanks, Carolyn

[elizilla]

I think that rather than coupling/decoupling the credit card, I'd apply a gift card as needed. That way if someone happened to attempt to purchase a book at just the right time, you'd at least be limiting how much damage they can do to your bank account.

Also, I don't think you can put more than six kindles on one account, regardless of how many of them you put the same book on at the same time.

Have you discussed the situation with Amazon support? They might be able to give you the ability to put more kindles on the same account, than is normally allowed.

[susan_cassidy]

You can definitely put an infinite number of Kindles or Kindle apps on one account. It is just that most books are limited to no more than 6 simultaneous usages (some books have fewer usages, like 3). That is limited by the publisher, not Amazon. Some books have unlimited usage, which also normally means that they do not have DRM.

Of course, the OP could use lots of books that are in the public domain, and therefore require no interface with Amazon at all. She could download from manybooks.net, mobileread.com, feedbooks.com, or gutenberg.org quite easily. Of course, some, if not all of the public domain books are also available from Amazon, which would possibly make them easier to download, but some versions of books are better than others. She will have to review the books first, in any case.

I've never heard of Amazon disabling wi-fi capability, so I would doubt that as a possibility.

Other than that, your ideas may work ok.

[CarolynBG]

Elizilla, thanks for your response and questions and suggestions. (Susan, pls see below :-) )

I just spoke with Chris at Amazon. According to Chris, I can indeed have as many devices, including Kindles, registered to one account as I wish. Where the limit is is in how many devices a given book may be on at a time (as I already knew and Susan confirms). Most books have a limit set by the publisher of being on 6 devices at a time (though there are exceptions in both directions), but once a book has been archived or deleted from the device or whatever, then a different device on the account can use it, at least according to Chris, confirming my questions to him about that. (FWIW, there is a story on edukindle about a teacher registering 80 Kindles to one account! a huge logistical mess necessitating a very careful production line...)

As for gift cards, I'm not entirely sure how that would work, but I am also not positive that gift cards are even an allowed purchase under the university procurement card rules.

Chris did not know of a way to turn off the wifi (but I did read somewhere it was possible so I'm still going to try to find someone in tech support who can do that) but he also suggested the idea of enabling the credit card only when purchases need to be made and then disabling it again.

Thank you for bringing up the concern, however; you forced me to verify what I had been assuming all along, and it's good to know it for certain rather than just assume! :-)

Susan: your post came in while I was composing this one :-)
I am going to get as many free books appropriate to this age group as possible. I am also going to start with approximately 200 bought-from-Amazon books that are interesting to this age group (on top of every free book I can lay my hands on), with money to buy more if a given child either wants to read more in a series, for instance, or just isn't finding books of interest. We've now got approx. $2400 in the grant for ebooks (more if I manage to save money on covers, for example, or need less for translation than I thought I would). I've priced out a fairly good-sized sample and they are approximately $5-6 per book, on average, with variation, for the books we are looking at. And then when the Harry Potter books come out, depending on cost and how many Kindles can have a copy at once, I'll get those too.

Which brings us back to the original question of how much managing do I want to do, and how to do it? I think it might be useful to know that all 6 copies of Magic Treehouse Book 1 were out and that 3 kids were waiting for it, for instance, and to know what books a given child has and how long they've had it. It's just finding out if there's any good way to do that already invented, or am I going to be inventing that from scratch.

Thank you both for your inputs. It IS helpful to me, believe me.

Carolyn

[pidgeon92]

Sounds like you need an ebook librarian. :roll eyes:

Seriously, this is going to have to be a manual process. Set up a database (Bento is an excellent choice of database software) to keep track of which kid has which Kindle, and which books are on which Kindle. You need to get the Kindle back from each child to update the books on the Kindle. The only way to turn wi-fi off is through the menu, and it's easy enough for anyone to turn it right back on, so you will need to de-register the Kindles when you give them to the kids.

Hopefully you are getting sturdy covers for each of the Kindles? The screens are relatively easy to break, especially if they are going to be carried around in backpacks.

I would like to say that I think this is a terrific thing that is being done for the kids. I hope you report back occasionally with how the students are getting along with the Kindles.

[CarolynBG]

Pidgeon92, thanks for replying.

That's what I feared, I have to set it up myself. OK, so be it. We already were going to keep track of which kid has which device, and already were going to have the kids have to go through me to get new books (I'll be making myself available at the school as often as the teacher deems would be useful and work with her schedule; this is what the district and principal wanted). The idea has been presented of removing the credit card from the account except for when I am actively buying books, so maybe I won't need to register/deregister each Kindle every time we have to update (far more work than just the credit card).

Yes, I am planning on getting covers for the Kindles; it's built into our grant :-)

This is a formal research experiment funded by the American Literacy council over the course of the school year. It is a very *small* project, just one classroom, and the kids are their own controls: half get the kindles in the fall, half in the spring, they take them home and do their at-home reading on them. The hope is that with these devices, the text-to-speech, and dictionary, that the kids will actually want to read more, pick up more vocab, etc. with than without. (This is the hypothesis driving the person at ALC who initiated the grant. We are just hoping for significant results, and I am the grunt labor making it actually happen.) This school had a great experience a couple years ago with iPod nanos with the teacher recording lessons on it; let's hope that from a similar population we get kids who enjoy using these and with that enjoyment comes better reading improvement.

Guess I'll go buy myself a Bento. (I've been meaning to for my own purposes anyway, so won't charge to the grant.)

Thanks again,
Carolyn

[pidgeon92]

Originally Posted by CarolynBG

The idea has been presented of removing the credit card from the account except for when I am actively buying books, so maybe I won't need to register/deregister each Kindle every time we have to update (far more work than just the credit card).

This is fine, but..... The archive will be visible on the Kindle, and they will be able to download any book already purchased to the account to the Kindle in their possession at any time, as long as a license is available.

[CarolynBG]

Originally Posted by pidgeon92

This is fine, but..... The archive will be visible on the Kindle, and they will be able to download any book already purchased to the account to the Kindle in their possession at any time, as long as a license is available.

I'm still going to TRY to get Amazon to disable the wifi (I ran into a discussion about something called CIPA today that is yet another reason to do disable the wifi; and I know that although it's rare, I have come across at least one person who did succeed in getting Amazon to disable the wifi). We'll also tell the students to leave it off if we can't get it disabled. As it is, the population we are dealing with are folks half of whom may not even have computers at home, much less wifi. And, if they WERE to download books that have already been bought on the account, the worst is that I would not know that one of the licenses has gone to one of the Kindles or to which one; they still wouldn't be able to buy new books on their own, which is the main purpose of disabling the credit card. So it wouldn't be a disaster, even if they weren't archiving/deleting books once done (unless we have very popular books that aren't being "returned"); my record-keeping just wouldn't be complete (and the record-keeping isn't part of the research, per se, just more for me to keep track of how many licenses are available, really, AND perhaps get a little bit more data as to how many and what books the kids are into).

Unless I'm missing something... (and if I am, please let me know; I've never managed a project quite like this one before, as is probably obvious from some of the things I've been saying today! :-) )

thanks for your input :-)

cjbg

[Pinecone]

You could also choose a different reader. One without wifi.

[CarolynBG]

Originally Posted by Pinecone

You could also choose a different reader. One without wifi.

Pinecone,
I wish sometimes I could. But actually, we are pretty tied in to the Kindle (especially at THIS point).

The grantor originally wanted the Kindle specifically because of the text-to-speech capability. I found that it was fairly clunky to use the way he intended, and I investigated a number of different readers, including the Nook, Kobo, and Sony, possibly a couple others. At that point wifi issues were not on the radar screen. (Kobo is right out not just because of Borders' problems but because their dictionary is horrid -- inflected forms of words are not linked, least not that I could ever get to work, and the sales folks literally had no clue -- but as far as I can remember, Kobo was the only one that didn't have wifi).

We narrowed it to the Nook (especially when the touch screen version came out) and the Kindle (price on both, honoring our grantors wish for text-to-speech keeping Kindle in play). As it turns out, when I mentioned these issues to the district rep and principal, they actually want the text-to-speech. So, Kindle it is.

Important to note: we are not pushing Kindle specifically; we are not looking for special deals from them; we do not intend to be their shill. A comparison of text readers would have to be just that -- randomly assigning kids to Kindle vs Nook vs whatever other. Our study will say very little about Kindle (other than maybe that text-to-speech is helpful, if the kids report using it) and definitely not say anything one way or the other about other eReaders, and instead the focus is about kids having eReaders at home. Quite honestly, I think the touch screen would have been handier for the kids looking up words. But Nooks also have wifi at the very least, as far as I know. (And with Nook, I think I can only register 6 per device, so we actually would have to buy more copies of books than with Kindle, where we can get away with one copy and just have only 6 kids reading it at a time if it's popular.)

But if we were to do a followup study and not use Kindle, what readers do you know of that don't have wifi? (That aren't Kobo, that is :-) )

Thanks, Carolyn

[exscentric]

Google for your database, you might find a template online, or something you could adapt to your use. Also check microsoft for templates, the old Works program came with a bunch and I think they have them for Word/Excel.

You might also ask Amazon if they could allow you to see their data usage on your account. I have no idea how much info they gather but would guess they track a bunch.

[Pinecone]

I see.

But IMO, text to speech will allow the students to NOT read the book, but listen to it.

[CarolynBG]

Originally Posted by Pinecone

I see.

But IMO, text to speech will allow the students to NOT read the book, but listen to it.

Indeed.
The original original idea of the person making the grant was that the students could get single words pronounced for them if they were struggling with the pronunciation of that word. He apparently had such struggles as a kid, and didn't find the dictionaries' methods of showing the pronunciation (typically with IPA or similar characters) to be useful. But anyone who's played with the TTS on Kindle knows it's awkward at best for that single word purpose. There are other things out there, or promised to come, that would be better, but they either aren't available yet, or aren't affordable to us, or aren't things the kids can take home...

I brought this up with the district rep and principal when I met with them. I figured 3rd graders are mostly reading silently anyway. But they (esp. the principal) know their particular students better than I do, and they were actually excited about the possibility of the students using TTS to first hear the words (presumably while reading along) then (I assume) reading again silently. In any case, they really latched onto that feature -- at that point in the process I'd just heard about the touch Nook which is at the same price (I think) as the Kindle, and was ready to switch to that; but I was beholden to our grantor to at least include the reasons the Kindle was on the list. And, as I said, the principal jumped on that. So he knows that's part of it, and wants it. So there you go. :-) I just do what the people paying me or allowing me to come into their schools tell me to do. (Not quite true; I've looked at many many things, and narrowed things down from the wide realms of possibilities, and certainly give my opinions about things. But in the end, it's the vision of the grantor, and also the needs/wants of the school, that drive much of what will happen.)