So I know I’ve been talking about Kindles a lot this week, but that’s because I have spent a lot of time with them in my hands. I finally finished rolling out the 54 Kindles for our classrooms earlier today, and have found some areas that Amazon could improve if it wants to become more attractive to schools or large corporations in general.
One of the things that Amazon does well with the Kindles is the allowing the owner to register them online. The onscreen keyboard is very annoying to use as you have to move the cursor to one spot at a time. When I first experienced that, I was dreading having to register them all because the email address we use is 30 characters long. I was overjoyed to find that I could register them online and I only needed the serial number to do so. This made it very easy to register, but this could still be improved.
The way you register a new Kindle to your account is by clicking the Register a Device link on the Amazon website. A popup opens and you enter in the serial number and hit accept. Amazon then adds the Kindle to your account and gives it a generic name. After the Devices page finishes reloading you can then rename the device, and wait for the page to reload again so you can add the next device. If Amazon made a bulk device adding page with the ability to enter multiple serials and edit the name on the same page it would save a lot of time.
I mentioned yesterday how great it is that most Kindle books come with six licenses. The problem is that you have to push each book individually to each Kindle. That means for the 54 Kindles we have with 10 books on each Kindle I had to go through the process of pushing a book over 500 times. If there was a way to create Kindle groups with six Kindles in a group and then push books to a whole group – or push multiple books at one time to a single Kindle – it would have saved me a lot of time. It would be just 50 clicks instead of 500.
Another great thing that Amazon does is show you the pending transfers to your devices. The Kindle has to be turned on and connected to WiFi in order to receive new books. This means that you can queue up all the books for your devices and then turn them on and push all the books at the same time. The problem is that there are some things that Amazon pushes to the Kindles on its own. There are a couple of welcome articles that get pushed and then I found out that some error messages will get pushed to the Kindles.
I was using a school credit card and I hit a snag about halfway through the purchasing when the card was declined for some reason. I tried it again a couple times, then just used a different card. However, this turned out to not be the issue. The issue was that Amazon decided it needed to send an article to every Kindle four times stating that there was a problem with my credit card. That means that I had over 200 articles to clear off the Kindles now. I noticed they were in the pending transfer section, but there is no way to cancel the transfer. It would have been very helpful if you could cancel pending transfers, but also if those kinds of messages were sent to the main email on the account, not to every single device on the account.
The whole process of adding multiple devices to a single account wasn’t completely terrible. However, a few small changes could easily simplify the whole process. Maybe when I have some time I will submit these ideas to Amazon and see what happens.
“I mentioned yesterday how great it is that most Kindle books come with six licenses. The problem is that you have to push each book individually to each Kindle.”
To be a buzzkill for a moment: I suspect that this has something to do with the fact that Amazon probably didn’t intend for the same license to be used by six different individuals at the same time. I have a feeling that number came up as a reasonable limit for the number of devices a person might have (a Kindle, a tablet, a smartphone, a desktop, and a laptop + 1).
In fact, in the Kindle terms of use it states, “Upon your download of Digital Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Kindle or a Reading Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Kindles or Other Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your PERSONAL, non-commercial use.” (emphasis added). This is probably also why they indicate that, “If you would like students to be able to have their own notes and bookmarks, you will need to register a maximum of one Kindle per Amazon account.”
Now, how to actually WORK AROUND this problem? I’m thinking that, rather than having to push a book to each of six one-at-a-time over wireless, you might be better off hooking all six to a computer, perhaps via a hub. Since the Kindles behave as mass storage devices, simply write (or have someone else write one if you can’t) a small script that simply copies the book to each (as the computer sees them) “drive”. This would be especially faster if you’re loading, say, 10 different books at once. There’s also no reason the script couldn’t copy to the Kindles simultaenously, which would save even more time. You’ll have to physically plug and unplug the Kindles after each batch, but it’s still faster than clicking something 60x times the number of Kindle groups you have.
If football teaM can use iPad a school should use kindles
In theory…yes. In reality…pro teams have BIG $$$, little schools do not.