Stephen's Untold Stories

This should be an interesting project. Anybody know of any other schools that are doing something similar?

According to The Arizona Republic, Amazon.com Kindles will be provided free to every student in professor Ted Humphrey’s honors class on the history of human culture and thought.

The Republic says Humphrey’s class is part of a national pilot program that aims to reduce costs and paper and compare e-books with traditional textbooks.

The 30 required books for Humphrey’s year-long course usually cost students about $475, but the Kindle (a wireless reading device that downloads e-books and displays them on an electronic screen) is expected to cut this expense in half.

If the students finish the course and participate in an evaluation, they get to keep the Kindle, the newspaper reports.

Link to article.

Now THIS is why I bought my Kindle.

I am taking a directed readings course this summer for which I have to read and summarize 24 research articles. Earlier today I found the first five articles in PDF format, and I used the free conversion feature from Amazon to convert those files to the Kindle file format. I transferred the files onto the Kindle using the USB cable, and I have been listening to the first article using the text to speech feature. I expect that I will find several articles this summer that will serve as the foundation for the review of literature for my dissertation, which I will be starting sometime next year. The Kindle is making it easier for me to read and gain true comprehension of these scholarly articles.

It might not sound like the most exciting reason to have a Kindle, but it is the most important one for me right now.

Now THIS is really sweet. I already installed it on my iPod touch, and it works great!

This could mean a lot for schools that have already purchased iPod touches for their students. Now they don’t have to buy a separate device.

You may not have the latest $359 Kindle electronic book reader from Amazon.com, but if you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, a new application will let you access much of the same content on your Apple device.

In a bid to increase its slice of the e-book market, the Seattle-based online retailer rolled out a free program Wednesday that brings several of the Kindle’s functions to the iPod and iPhone’s smaller screen.

The program, which can be downloaded from Apple’s online application store, lets iPhone and iPod Touch users read the same electronic books that Kindle owners can buy on Amazon.com. As with the Kindle, the iPhone app lets users change the text size on the screen, and add bookmarks, notes and highlights.

The application does not connect to the Kindle store, however, so users must access the Web browser on their iPhone, iPod or computer to buy the content. Users cannot read magazines and newspapers on the Kindle application, either.

If you happen to have a Kindle and an iPhone, Amazon‘s program will handily sync the two so you can keep your place in the same book on both devices.

Read the rest here.

Simply amazing. I’ve only had it a few hours, and I am already hooked. I downloaded several free e-books, and subscribed to a few newspapers. All of the papers come with a free 14-day trial, so I’ll see how it goes. I also downloaded the first chapter of Joe Torre’s recent book about the Yankees. You can do that for most books that you might want to buy later. Reading on the device is almost like reading a real book. No eye strain at all.

I found a lot of really good free books here: http://www.feedbooks.com

Anybody else out there got one?