The Social

Leaked photos of the alleged 'Kindle DX' device from Amazon.

(Credit: Engadget)

Newspapers hoping the next version of Amazon.com's Kindle e-reader will be a savior for their beleaguered businesses are likely to be disappointed when it's unveiled Wednesday. But this Kindle could win plenty of converts in academia.

Amazon is slated to unveil a new, larger-screen version of the Kindle, which it originally launched late in 2007. Possibly called the Kindle DX, the new device is designed for reading newspapers, magazines, and textbooks, and it's expected to be part of new electronic course material test-runs at six universities this fall. The list, according to The Wall Street Journal, consists of Pace University (where Amazon is holding Wednesday's press conference), Case Western Reserve, Reed College, Arizona State University, the Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Princeton University--Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' alma mater, which already publishes Kindle textbooks.

This move makes loads of sense. Anyone who's been to a U.S. college in the past few decades could tell you that textbooks are very highly--some would say obscenely--priced. They're also bulky, and often difficult to get rid of once purchased: Selling the third edition of an introductory biology textbook on the used-book market is pretty difficult when the fourth edition comes out a year later. Theoretically, this should be the perfect market for an electronic reader like the Kindle.

But just because Amazon has inked a few deals with textbook companies, and a handful of prominent academic institutions, doesn't mean that hordes of incoming freshmen across the U.S. will be moving into dorms this fall with Kindles in hand.

"I do think the textbook market will be the killer app for e-readers," said Sarah Epps, a media analyst at Forrester Research. "(But) we think it's going to start to develop in 2011 and really pick up in 2013...We've been talking to publishers, talking to universities, and what we're seeing is that from the publisher perspective there's some hesitation."

Why's this? There are a lot of questions for the publishing industry, the biggest of which is whether electronic textbooks will take a bite out of the profits that manufacturers are making from paper textbooks. There's also the potential issue of licensed content in textbooks that might not have digital rights stipulated in its original agreement with the publishers. Then, as Epps pointed out, there's the Google problem.

For the past few years, Google has been pushing forward a book scanning and digitization project called Google Book Search, and though it has some prominent allies in the industry, to say that Google Book Search has been controversial would be putting it lightly. The Association of American Publishers sued the search giant in 2005 over potential copyright violations. Authors and publishers of out-of-print books have petitioned for royalties from digitized books. More recently, library industry trade groups have expressed concern in the form of a legal filing over what Google's efforts could mean for their business. An agreement in court has been delayed.

For Amazon, this could mean that it'll have to deal with some publishers who have become quite suspicious of large-scale digital book projects. But on the flip side, this could work to the Seattle-based retailer's advantage: if the digital shift is as inevitable as it appears, and Google is to be the Silicon Valley villain in this story, then Amazon, which has been in the book business for nearly two decades, could be the friendlier alternative.

There's also the potential for the new Kindle, whatever it's called, to have a significant impact outside the U.S. Forrester analyst Epps speculates that it will make waves in developing markets like China and India, where there are millions of university students with tight textbook budgets. "Using e-readers for textbooks would be incredibly empowering for students in their universities," Epps said, "but that's going to take some time."

It's clear that Amazon could shake up the twin pillars of educational publishing and academia with its new Kindle, potentially a much bigger splash than the launch of the original Kindle or its improved Kindle 2 successor earlier this year. What's less clear is how immediate the change will be. And what's even less clear is what impact the new, bigger Kindle will have on the market that everyone was expecting Amazon would target: print periodicals.

Rumor has it that The New York Times will be part of Wednesday's Kindle announcement, possibly lowering its price for a Kindle subscription. But this doesn't mean that Amazon's skinny gadget will suddenly save print media: Newspaper and magazine publishers may think they still get the short end of the stick.

"The way things work now, newspapers and magazines can distribute their content over the Kindle if they want, but it's not a very good model for them. Amazon is keeping the majority of the revenue," Epps said. "In addition, there are some business problems, like that publishers can't count subscribers toward their rate base, so it's diluting rather than adding to their subscription base from the perspective of the business."

But while Amazon has the textbook market in focus, it shouldn't let newspapers and magazines get away from it: this is somewhere that the manufacturer of a rival e-reader could sneak in.

"Some of the other device competitors that will be coming to the market over the next year may be more appealing partners for newspaper publishers," Epps said. "It's another distribution channel for their content, but not all distribution channels are created equal. So there could be a great opportunity for publishers to distribute their content on other types of e-readers, where they have a more favorable business model."

A team of researchers from the University of Georgia has come to a conclusion that will undoubtedly turn the tech world on its side (ha): if you use Facebook to promote your lovely self, it shows through. Narcissists, or those psychologically defined as "excessively egotistical," will inflate their profiles on the social network with more photos, massive friends lists, and packed activity feeds.

As we used to say on the playground in third grade, duh.

"We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others," study leader and Ph.D. student Laura Buffardi said in a Live Science article about the study. Past research back in the dinosaur days of the Web had revealed similar conclusions about narcissists and personal Web pages. Imagine how hard it was to self-promote when you had to know how to use HTML to turn the background of your personal homepage pink!

In order to conduct the study, untrained observers were shown Facebook profiles and asked to identify which ones belonged to people who are classified as narcissists. The narcissists' profiles were easy to pick out, the researchers noted.

The report is published in October's issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin academic journal.

"Narcissists might initially be seen as charming, but they end up using people for their own advantage," study co-author W. Keith Campbell said to Live Science. "They hurt the people around them and they hurt themselves in the long run."

So it looks like now the prolific Internet chatter about oversharers, bloggy self-promoters, and "wantrepreneurs" now has some academic basis.

When I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, many of the panelists and speakers invited the audience to ask them questions by submitting Twitter messages. A Google engineer named Taliver Heath has gone one step further by creating Google Moderator, an application that lets the audiences at lectures and discussions submit questions and vote on the ones they'd like to hear answered.

Google Moderator, earlier named "Dory" after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, started out as an internal tool. It was originally intended for the audiences at Google's "Tech Talks" series, then was extended to company all-hands meetings and other lectures at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

"There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn't clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked," Heath wrote in a blog post. "And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate."

After a few requests, Google has now released Moderator to the general public as part of its Google App Engine platform, and it's now available for free use. I'll start by asking a question about Moderator: What if audiences are too busy reading and voting on question submissions to actually listen?

Danah Boyd, a researcher best known for her ethnographic studies of social networks, has been tapped to be part of Microsoft Research New England, the company's new research facility in Cambridge, Mass.

"Going to (Microsoft Research) will allow me to continue the research I do and it will give me a productive, collaborative, interdisciplinary environment in which to do it," Boyd wrote in a post on her blog on Sunday night. "There's amazing work at MSR concerning social media and even those at MSR-NE who are not working on social media are more than open to the topics engendered by it and more than ecstatic to engage with me. Being in a room full of scientists might not seem like the most obvious fit, but really, you have to meet them to understand how invigorating an environment it is."

Boyd will keep her gig as a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, but she's wrapping up her dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley and moving to the Boston area full-time. She says she'll join the Microsoft Research New England team in January.

Previously, she worked as a researcher at both Yahoo and Google. Last year, she rose to Internet fame when she published a paper called "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life" that explored the demographic and economic differences between young people who use Facebook versus those who use MySpace.