Today Amazon announced the release of a new digital textbook creator tool for educators and authors to easily create digital textbooks, called eTextbooks, and other educational content to promote and sell on the Kindle Store.
The new program is called KDP EDU. It’s a new division to the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. KDP EDU is designed to prepare, publish and promote textbooks (the three p’s) and educational content in Kindle Stores to reach millions of students worldwide.
“Kindle Textbook Creator makes it easy for anyone to take any PDF and create a richly featured and widely available eTextbook,” said Chuck Kronbach, Director, Kindle Direct Publishing. “We look forward to seeing how authors use the new tool and getting their feedback to guide us in adding more features to KDP EDU over time.”
Currently at launch the Kindle Textbook Creator is still in its Beta phase. What KTC does is it helps convert PDF files of textbooks, course notes, study guides, and other educational content that can include complex visual information like charts, graphs and equations into Kindle eTextbooks.
Books created with Kindle Textbook Creator include features to help enhance the learning experience. There’s multicolor highlights, notebooks to keep track of key info including images and text notes, flashcards to study definitions in each chapter, dictionary and Wikipedia reference, and syncing across Kindle apps and Fire tablets.
Interestingly, these type of textbooks aren’t offered on Kindle ebook readers, despite carrying that brand name. Amazon’s eTextbooks are offered on Fire tablets, the iPad and iPhone apps, Android devices, Mac and PC.
Textbooks really haven’t taken off digitally like you’d think they would in this digital age. You gotta give Amazon credit for at least trying to bring more educational content to the Kindle Store with this new initiative.
Okay, so you can highlight text, add text notes, chart and graphs, search Wikipedia, and sync across devices with this new format? Wow, that’s amazing. But wait, Couldn’t you do all that already in standard Kindle ebooks? So basically you can now add flashcards? And maybe there’s support for MathML (although the release notes don’t specify).
And by the way, you state that eTextbooks
“aren’t offered on Kindle devices,” but they are on Fire tablets. Aren’t those Kindle devices too? Bit of a contradiction there.
Amazon dropped the Kindle name and branding from their line of tablets last year. They are just Fire tablets now, nothing with Kindles. Like Fire TV and Fire Phone.
And yet you create files for them using the KINDLE Textbook Creator, not the FIRE Textbook Creator. The KTC page itself states that you can “Preview your book on Kindle devices” rather than saying “Fire devices.” Moreover, the files will work on Kindle Fire tablets released prior to the recent models that dropped the Kindle brand, so the statement that “textbooks aren’t offered on Kindle devices” is not strictly true. Besides, everyone I know still calls their Fire tablet a Kindle anyway, and likely always will.
I changed “Kindle devices” to “Kindle ebook readers” so that it makes more sense to those that don’t know the difference.