About

Welcome to eReadia, the company I founded after falling in love with my first Kindle a couple of years ago. Since then, I have been blogging about the Kindle and other issues in ereading at EduKindle |dot| com, twittering away about all things Kindle and ereading as @edukindle, noshing with other ereading educators on the Kindle Educators Group Ning community, and devising new tools for the Kindle, like Notepad for Kindle, which has been selling pretty well on Amazon since 2008.

My name is Will DeLamater and that’s me to the left with my Kindle DX. As an English major in college and a high school English teacher for many years before joining the publishing industry, I find this device a real “game changer.” Through my explorations of the device from an educator’s perspective, I hope to add something to the growing body of expertise regarding the Kindle.

One project that really took off at EduKindle is the Kindlepedia, a tool that I built with the help of eBook Architects and its founder Joshua Tallent. (Joshua is really the best person out there if you want your content formatted to perfection for various platforms.) Kindlepedia was designed to allow visitors to input a link from Wikipedia and generate a well-formatted ebook from the article that could be transferred to the Kindle for reading later. In fact, one of the early tag lines for eReadia was “Your online reading, offline.” Kindlepedia has generated thousands of ebooks free for users in the year or so that it has been available.

The success of Kindlepedia led to our next undertaking, the creation of an online tool that would allow users to bind several articles from Wikipedia and other sources into an expanded ebook for reading on various mobile reading platforms. After many debates, we decided to call the website eReadUps, as in “what do you want to read up on?” eReadUps has been in public beta for several months, and is expected to launch in final form in mid-2010. With eReadUps, users can create ebooks for free from Wikipedia articles, like they did with Kindlepedia, or they can subscribe to the Premium version and get access to articles from a number of sources, store them in an online My Stuff folder, email ebooks that they have created to their devices (like the Kindle), or export them in PDF format for printing or distribution. eReadUps outputs ebooks in three formats: Kindle (a Mobipocket” file), ePub (which works on most other readers, including iPhone and iPad), or, as I mentioned, PDF for printing.

eReadia places a special emphasis on ereading in education. We are establishing partnerships with organization like Connexions, an open source education materials repository housed at Rice University, and WorldRreader, a non-profit which is extending the reach of ereaders to all corners of the globe, where students desperately need access to books.

eReadia also provides services to the education community, including online “how-to’s” and tutorials, consulting services to districts considering digital text and mobile reading platforms to improve student reading achievement, and on-site training for teachers in the use of these remarkable new devices. Educators should use the Contact page for inquiries about how eReadia can help.

Thanks for visiting eReadia, and please be in touch with your questions and ideas. You can send me a message using the Contact page here at the site.