Things I read this morning
This morning, I read an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education's magazine section written by a university dean who experimented with different ways of reading the same book — via a printed book, an audiobook, an iPhone and a Kindle.
"The iPhone is a Kindle killer," Ann Kirschner concluded in the article, which I ironically enough read on my iPhone.
Kirschner cast the Kindle as the older reader's device of choice, describing the time she took hers on vacation:
All the grown-ups on beach chairs seemed to have one, as if we all had obeyed some secret command to buy Kindles and wear sunscreen. In fact, readers 50 or older are the largest group of Kindle buyers. Therein lies the clue to Kindle's short life. Middle-aged readers think that the dimension of the screen is critical. It's not: The members of the generation that grew up playing Game Boys and telling time on their cellphones will have absolutely no problem reading from a small screen.
That made me wonder if ASU's upcoming experiment with the jumbo-sized Kindles as a replacement for textbooks will actually go over well with twentysomething students or just with their professors (who, it should be noted, in some cases also read books on iThings themselves).
Or maybe something like the iPhone will become the next big textbook thing. Missouri's J-school is requiring that incoming students buy an iPhone or iPod Touch, but The Maneater reports that the school aims to deliver recorded lectures, not textual material, to the devices.
Also of note
Today's LA Times profiles a Watts priest who has not only seen the shifting demographics that I saw in nearby South LA but has worked to bridge the gap between Watts' black and Latino residents. Oh, and this guy who speaks Spanish and has masses with gospel standards is a 56-year-old white guy from Ireland.
Over on the other coast, The New York Times looked at a company that puts former LDS missionaries' door-to-door skills to work selling security systems instead of selling people on the Book of Mormon.
And in other Mormon news, @tessamuggeridge noted that KSL-TV reports a Desert News church-news Twitter account was hacked. But more interesting, I think, is that there's a Social Media Club of Salt Lake City, from which KSL draws its "computer expert" source.