To get four textbooks from North America to here for another synchronous online classroom has put me in touch with:
-five different book distributors
-four separate couriers to bring the books at no cost.
To make these arrangements:
-loads of messages in two different e-mail accounts
So far:
-one missed deadline on a courier's departure
-one book listed but not in stock
What looks much simpler than my present craziness? Purchase the Kindle electronic reader, then go to Amazon.com and buy and download to the mobile device the textbooks* as pdf files.
But wait . . . and here a line from the movie "Witness" seems to fit:
"You're plain, John Book."
Book is a streetwise Newark detective brought by circumstances into a cultural clash with Eli Lapp, a wizened elder of a religious community known as the Amish. At Lapp's farming community where cows are milked by hand and homes are lighted by lanterns, Book and Lapp's grandson find refuge from corrupt cops bent on destroying the witness to a murder. Book too, becomes "plain" like the Amish.
Books are "plain"compared to flashy digital technologies like the Kindle a gal showed me in conversation at the airport several months ago. She told of its adjustable font size for easier reading. She displayed the lighted screen and mentioned the free books she'd downloaded. Shelves full of books, newspaper subscriptions fit onto a Kindle's memory.
Still, I am sporadically "Amish"on the world's techno wonders, liking the old ways. My love affair with pages began decades ago.
I face a growing list that needs to be transferred to a digital format: audio heirlooms (on cassette), Miles Davis jazz (on LP), radio productions and other prizes. (Some available from I-tunes, of course.)
Hopes ran high for a viewing method after I acquired some used, LP record-sized, digital-format disks of the civil rights movement in the United States. But I finally disposed of them, the information a prisoner of a short-lived technology. Our collection of VHS-format movies, well we still use those . . . for how long we don't know.
These technologies are from my lifetime. In contrast, my oldest book, by a pastor named Henry Ward Beecher, was published in 1854.
It still works as well as it did when it came off the press.
Book, I know you. I can judge you by your cover, in spite of the old expression that says otherwise. I open the cover and begin interacting with the content. The interaction is thorough; I use a highlighting pen.
Book, you are dressed in black and white.
Book you have no buttons.
Book, you are plain.
I like that.
(Just for fun, here is a video on Youtube called "Helpdesk in the Middle Ages." A similar one explains features of Book on this site for website visitors who speak Spanish.)
*none were available in Kindle format, although other textbooks are. Of 20 textbooks I´ve used over the last couple of years, five are available as Kindle books.
Still, I am sporadically "Amish"on the world's techno wonders, liking the old ways. My love affair with pages began decades ago.
I face a growing list that needs to be transferred to a digital format: audio heirlooms (on cassette), Miles Davis jazz (on LP), radio productions and other prizes. (Some available from I-tunes, of course.)
Hopes ran high for a viewing method after I acquired some used, LP record-sized, digital-format disks of the civil rights movement in the United States. But I finally disposed of them, the information a prisoner of a short-lived technology. Our collection of VHS-format movies, well we still use those . . . for how long we don't know.
These technologies are from my lifetime. In contrast, my oldest book, by a pastor named Henry Ward Beecher, was published in 1854.
It still works as well as it did when it came off the press.
Book, I know you. I can judge you by your cover, in spite of the old expression that says otherwise. I open the cover and begin interacting with the content. The interaction is thorough; I use a highlighting pen.
Book, you are dressed in black and white.
Book you have no buttons.
Book, you are plain.
I like that.
(Just for fun, here is a video on Youtube called "Helpdesk in the Middle Ages." A similar one explains features of Book on this site for website visitors who speak Spanish.)
*none were available in Kindle format, although other textbooks are. Of 20 textbooks I´ve used over the last couple of years, five are available as Kindle books.
Posts
