In July 2009, Amazon decided to remove some content from thousands of Kindles. They removed every copy of George Orwell’s 1984, including the notes high school student Justin Gawronski’s had taken for his summer assignment.

Amazon deleted two books by Orwell, 1984 and Animal Farm, from their inventory when the publishing company decided they did not want their books to be electronically available. In addition to just removing the books from being able to be purchased, Amazon deleted those books from the Kindles of users who had already purchased the books. In this process, they also deleted any notes or comments that users had made in their personal Kindles about the book that they had purchased.

Some have called Amazon the homework-eating-dog of the 21st century. Gawronski decided to sue Amazon for destroying his homework. And on October 1, 2009, he won. He won big, earning $150,000 in the lawsuit. Read the rest of this entry »

In a pilot program at Princeton to assess the value of Amazon’s Kindle DX for students, it seems the class has graded the gadget as a no pass.

Fifty students were given the digital e-reader in the test, and after a mere two weeks of being used in three classes, students are “dissatisfied and uncomfortable.” One student made his case by saying it’s “a poor excuse of an academic tool.”

The greatest criticism is coming from the lack of ability to highlight, mark pages, or make notes in margins. Additionally, anyone trying to cite a page number is out of luck, with one student calling it “meaningless.”

It’s entirely likely that the Kindle DX won’t see the light of day in the spring semester.

Almost one year ago, Amazon launched the Kindle with the sole purpose of cornering the digital books market. For those of you that don’t know, this gadget is a fully functional digital library. Since our previous story on the Kindle, Amazon has made some much-needed updates including a larger screen, sleeker profile, and greater storage capacity.  They have also integrated a 3G wireless network enabled browser within the system to allow for a 60 second download of your favorite title.

In an attempt to broaden the uses of this device to college students around the world, Amazon has made an agreement, dubbed “The Kindle Project,” with six universities. Amazon has agreed to provide the Fall 2009 freshman class of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Pace University, Princeton University, Reed College, Darden School at the University of Virginia and Arizona State University with Kindle devices preloaded with electronic versions of their chemistry, computer science and freshman seminar classes. Read the rest of this entry »

WorldCat is the catalog system that lets you search most public libraries across the nation, and has updated their website to reflect the growing social networking trend. Once setting up an account, you can then manage your profile, which allows you to do such cliché things as upload your picture, list your interests and link to your personal website or blog. Then you can list your favorite libraries, rate and review the books that you have read and also follow people with similar reading habits as you or who keep a list that you might be interested in. You can also follow individual people via RSS or push your own RSS feed to your social network of choice, such as Twitter, FriendFeed, or MySpace. If you spy a book that is worth owning, you can click straight to its page on Amazon.com, indicating that WorldCat may also have a new revenue stream aiding these developments. Read the rest of this entry »