Sunday, February 26, 2012

Discussing the book we have all read

Not easy to collect the marked passages of a book
All the student-marked passages constitute a great basis for comparison and contrast

It is quite possible to read a book, enjoy reading it, and learn from doing so without marking it, or copying any passage.  It is surprisingly pleasant to just read each word with little additional effort.  Just as much so to see afterwards that various passages and ideas are in your memory and mind.  On the other hand, if you are planning to make a presentation or a blog post about a book, it relieves anxiety, though, to mark interesting passages on which to comment or question.  Using a bright yellow or green highlighting pen makes the parts stand out and easily seen while paging through the book.  

If the members of an interested class or group all do that independently, the books used might be set aside if the marked passages were all assembled.  A list of them could be arranged in the order in which the passages come up in the book and the names or initials of the group members who selected a given passage could be placed at each passage.  Paging through each copy to find each of the marked places would take time and might be both somewhat tedious and error-prone.  

Not so much if all involved use a Kindle, the ereader from Amazon.  That technology, using a Kindle, is fast, easy and accurate to mark a passage, transfer the file of all marked passages to a computer and print or display them.  Amazon already does this on the web site kinde.amazon.com.  There a Kindle user can see his own highlights and the popular highlights, sections cited by many readers.

Amazon Kindle ebooks can be read on smartphones and anywhere on the web and on any PC or Mac.  The ability to highlight, correlate and copy or quote appears to differ from one sort of device to another.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety


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