Bernie Goldbach in Ennis | Shot while listening to the Small Business Show
I'VE A "SAVED SEARCH" for Kindle in several online tracking systems because I believe that platform's use is growing faster than Twitter. It's certainly growing revenue faster than many social networks and points to job prospects for our third level students in the Limerick Institute of Technology.
I'm interested in Kindle because I teach an e-publishing module in LIT--possibly the only third level e-publishing module in Ireland assessed totally through the completion of Kindle, iBook and PDF documents. The module surveys the challenge of becoming a published author through traditional channels and lays out a process for publishing to both the Kindle platform and the Apple Book Store. Both can result in real money alongside mainstream acclamation.
What's remarkable for me is considering that by teaching this module, we are actually helping students create their own jobs. The curriculum itself is part of a self-published success story along with a story about the evolution of local newspapers that deserves to be acclaimed in the mainstream press this year.
Equally remarkable is how today's authors do not have to subject themselves to ploughing a tourtous row through agents, editors and publishers. They can take pride and publish themselves with a proper ISBN number and potential a listing as a Google Scholar. Publishers certainly play a role in print media but paying people, using online book sales points provided by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Waterstones will provide a virtual store front for titles.
Mobile devices provide very affordable viewing platforms for printed products that we used to churn out every semester. During the past academic year, every student in the BSc for Creative Multimedia I taught owned a mobile device that could see course documentation downloaded over a free wifi node via a weblink or an email attachment. Many could receive a summary of my blog as a Kindle product.
I prepare written handouts in LIT for three reasons nowadays. First, some students claim they can learn only by looking at paper. Second, the newest handouts I make contain QR codes that link to course material stored in the cloud on Google Docs, Evernote or Dropbox. And third, there are some people holding jobs with a specification to print material for lecturers.
During the summer months, lecturers like me spend time revising material for higher education. My focus this summer will be on writing final exams first, then snapping together 10 major chapters of downloadable e-books in epub (Apple iBook) and mobi (Kingle) format for six different academic modules. If plans hold to course, I'll be using the iBook Creator in a new Mac Lab along with Kindlegen and the KDP Kindle Direct Publishing.
I have discovered ways to reduce book costs for students by looking at free e-book titles and reduced cost electronic editions among the 1.3m e-book titles currently listed in the Amazon Kindle Library. I'm trawling through this library to find companion titles that might be useful in the primary school curriculum of Ireland.
Adopting Kindle Publishing at third level will show others how lecture notes, essential reading material and sample papers could be served via the Amazon and Apple stores. This is a major achievement for me professionally, one I will explain in greater detail during the e-learning summer school (#elss) in the Dublin Institute of Technology on Wednesday, June 13, 2012.
Bernie Goldbach curates links about Kindle and he is tracking #elss12 online.
