Sent to you by Sean McBride via Google Reader: Harvard Medical School used Kindles to deliver course documents via TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home by Paul Biba on 10/15/08 Now we begin to see the power of not only ebooks, but that of a connected ereader. This makes it all the more important that Sony get its wireless version of the ereader on line.
John D. Halamka, MD, MS, is Chief Information Officer of the CareGroup Health System, Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, Chairman of the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network (NEHEN), CEO of MA-SHARE (the Regional Health Information Organization), Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and a practicing Emergency Physician. He has a blog called “Life as a Healthcare CIO” and his latest post describes using the Kindle to deliver course documents at the School. He goes on to say: We’ve recently implemented Kindle support for all our 20,000 educational resources at HMS. Our integration on the Mycourses educational website enables any Word or PDF document to be delivered to the Kindle wirelessly. There is a cost which is clearly explained to the user (10 cents per document to Amazon). Those that don’t want to pay the 10 cents can download documents to their PC and transfer the documents via USB cable. Once the user enters their Kindle account into the MyCourses Kindle setup page (accessible via our resources page or the GoMobile page), any resource which can be sent to the device has a little icon and label “My Kindle” which when clicked sends the resource to the Kindle. It does this by sending the document to the Amazon account via email attachment which then gets converted into Kindles’s specific format and delivered to the device using Sprint’s Whispernet. HMS is the first Medical School to offer such a green alternative to all of their compatible resources to be downloaded directly to an eBook. At some point it would be nice to bypass the 10 cent fee with some utility that allows us to send to the device, but it’s a reasonable cost when you consider that Sprint is giving Kindle users free internet. We’re rolling this out by giving a few students free Kindles to pilot the new Mycourses functionality. I’ll report back how it goes. Since we spend $50,000 a year on paper for printing course documents, I hope it is successful! Things you can do from here: - Subscribe to TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home using Google Reader - Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites
