Aimed at kids ages three to eight, FreeTime Unlimited is an optional extension of Kindle FreeTime, a free feature available on any Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD, and Kindle Fire HD 8.9″. FreeTime enables parents to limit their children’s screen time and manage the content that kids can access.

Parents have already shared nine million titles with their children via FreeTime Unlimited, according to the release. The average parent provides his or her child with 18 titles, though some allow them more than 160.

Titles now being added include educational apps like Curious George at the Zoo, The Berenstain Bears and the Big Spelling Bee, Little Critter, and Triceratops Gets Lost from the Smithsonian Institution. There’s also educational content from BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr.as well as games such as Tetris, MONOPOLY Millionaire, The Game of LIFE, and LEGO Harry Potter years 1-4.

Exclusive Nick Jr, characters including Dora the Explorer, Go, Diego, Go! are also on offer.  Upcoming titles will include Where’s my Mickey? Monsters University, and more LEGO games such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter Years 5-7.

Parents can create up to six FreeTime Unlimited profiles that determine what kind of content will be made available to their individual children, and they can also choose content from their own collection. Advertisements and social media don’t show up on a child’s home screen, and “all of the content is already pre-screened for child appropriateness,” the press release says.

Amazon Prime members pay $2.99 monthly per child or $6.99 per family for FreeTime Unlimited. Non-Prime customers pay $4.99 per child or $9.99 per family monthly.

When word came out that Amazon was pulling social network Goodreads into its acquisitional tractor beam, reaction seemed to fall into one of two categories—either Big Brother Bezos (as in Amazon CEO Jeff) has again sprouted horns and can’t wait to get his hands on your user data, or chill pal “Jeff B.” is throwing on his Ray-Bans, giving one of those L.L. Cool J kiss-two-fingers-then-make-a-peace-signs and is going to improve your reading life.

I’m somewhere in between.

While Goodreads runs ads, it isn’t directly selling the things it advertises. I like that. Amazon is definitely selling things, so there’s reason the acquisition is giving some pause and driving others to seek alternatives.

Additional uncertainty stems from the status of user reviews. Some are concerned that reviews they’ve written on Goodreads will end up on Amazon—a place they didn’t intend. I post reviews on both sites, so this possibility doesn’t bother me a whole lot—but might strike some as a mild form of theft.

A large motivation behind the deal is the prospect of bringing the Goodreads experience to the Kindle. I can foresee the Kindle talking to a user’s Goodreads account, updating the to-read shelf when a new book is purchased or borrowed, and marking it as read when finished. A couple quick taps would allow you see what friends are reading and recommending. As owner of both a Kindle and a Goodreads account, it will be interesting to see how they merge the two.

Libraries that lend Kindles will probably want to keep an eye out and stay on top of any new Goodreads integrations. It seems likely that other ereaders will follow suit, adding more social features.

For those interested in making a switch, there are other options. Unfortunately two of the most appealing are either completely (Shelfari) or partially (LibraryThing) owned by Amazon. It seems silly to jump ship to either of these.

One alternative is Riffle, which is more of a Facebook app than stand-alone website. But I feel like I’m bugging my Facebook friends when I fill their newsfeeds with the books I’m reading (granted, options allow you to share as much or as little as you’d like). After using the service, I realized I like keeping my reading social network separate. Riffle’s Pinterest-y interface has a nice look, but its features feel lightweight in comparison to Goodreads. It would make a good choice for a more casual reader.

Bookish is another option, with author and title information, original articles, and virtual shelves to keep track of reading. It’s much more of a recommendation engine than database. Enter books you’ve read and receive suggestions. The database is growing, but I found mixed results. It also has direct ties to publishers, which might make users seeking a bias-free zone a bit hesitant. It looks slick and functions smoothly though.

Booklikes is an interesting entry into the Goodreads alternative race. This site treats book reviews like blog posts. Sign up for the service and you get a blog to post about your reading in addition to star ratings, shelves, searching, and other familiar features.

Other options aren’t too promising: either confusing or in various states of abandonment. It quickly makes one realize that Goodreads is the best at what they do.

Getting down to basics with the Amazon/Goodreads deal, we have a company that sells books looking for a way to sell more books by improving how readers find new books. Goodreads, with its quickly-growing network of readers (myself included), was an attractive addition. Early signs indicate Goodreads won’t see a total change of mission, so I’m not clicking the “delete account” button yet. But, as with many other Goodreads users, it might not take much.

“Goodreads was fully independent…. it made them the natural allies of people who wanted to avoid the consolidation of the industry, in particular publishers,” LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding told LJ. “I have a lot of respect for Amazon. They’re a very smart company. But I’m personally worried about them controlling the entire book world, and it’s really kind of heading that way.”

The acquisition presents an opportunity for LibraryThing to build a stronger bond between publishers, independent booksellers, and the site’s 1.6 million users, he argued in a blog post shortly after last week’s sale was announced.

“Publishers are desperate to find a way out of the Amazon trap—needing Amazon, but also competing more and more with Amazon’s own publishing operations, and finding their individual and collective power declining as Amazon’s grows,” he wrote.

Spalding acknowledged that Amazon also owns a stake in LibraryThing, acquired when it purchased the popular online used bookseller Abebooks in 2008. (The company bought out social media site Shelfari the same year.) Abebooks had been a minority investor in LibraryThing prior to the acquisition, and Amazon has maintained its stake since the purchase.

However, reports that Amazon’s stake is as high as 40% of LibraryThing are inaccurate and fail to take into account that ProQuest affiliate Bowker is also a minority shareholder in the company, according to Spalding. He continues to retain majority ownership, but declined to disclose additional information about how shares of LibraryThing are divided.

Courting allies

Spalding predicts that that Hachette, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster will redouble their efforts with their social media joint venture Bookish.com, and noted that publishers were also demonstrating renewed interest in LibraryThing.

“We’ve already seen publishers writing us and saying ‘we want to leave the Goodreads early reviewers program [First Reads] and go back into yours,” he said.

As an industry observer, Spalding said he is most interested in how the Goodreads service will be integrated with Kindle e-readers and apps.

“The downside of that is that e-readers [as dedicated platforms] are inherently monopolistic,” he said. “The technology just lends itself to concentration. This just underscores that. But sharing is so much easier when you don’t have to type anything in…. I’m of mixed opinion about it myself. But [integrating social media into an e-reader] needs to be tried, nobody has tried it, and I think that they have a real opportunity there. I’m excited to see what they can do.”

Overall, Spalding sees little downside for LibraryThing as a result of the acquisition. Goodreads already had the largest user base, by far, in this segment of social media, and LibraryThing had continued to draw steady traffic and sell software to libraries including LibraryThing for Libraries, LibraryAnywhere, and BookPsychic. The acquisition by Amazon does give Goodreads additional heft, along with a new marketing platform in the Kindle, but independent startup companies often slow down once they are acquired and integrated into much larger corporations, he noted.

Many LibraryThing members also have accounts with Goodreads, and use the services for different purposes, Spalding said.

“They’re not fully competitors. A common use pattern is to use Goodreads as ‘here’s what I’m reading now,’ posting that to Facebook and interacting socially. And then LibraryThing is where you store your whole library. We have a lot of users who do that.”

Photo: Stockbyte

Fans of baseball, football, and basketball, you all have something in common: it’s easy for you to tell what team is on the field, which one is off of it, and when players are changing their roles from offense to defense. In baseball, of course, three outs and the team at-bat retreats into the dugout, picks up its mitts, and trots back onto the field. In football, there are many variations and tricks of the trade. For example, a “hurry-up” offense is designed to move so quickly that the defense doesn’t have time to substitute fresh players onto the field. But in general, the exchange of players in our nation’s major sports is a slow and stately process that’s based on principles that kids learn when they first begin playing a particular game. There’s one sport, though, that’s totally different from the others—and I suspect it has a lesson to teach those of us in library land.

Unlike other sports, in hockey, players “change on the fly.” That is, a coach signals a group of players to jump onto the ice even as the others are whizzing off—the exchange happens in the middle of a play, as the puck is speeding down the ice. Hockey is such an exhausting sport that players only last a few minutes playing at full tilt, so a coach is constantly deliberating over whom to put in while trying to outguess the other coach’s moves. It’s a speeded-up, live chess match on ice.

I’m put in mind of hockey because of some recent developments in digital publishing. We’ve long known that Overdrive offers libraries subscriptions, rather than full ownership of books. Now Amazon has gotten into the act, offering its Prime members (who pay an annual fee) an ebook subscription. It strikes me that collection development is similar to the easy ebb and flow of offense and defense that I first described. A librarian knows her collection, sees where she needs to add titles, and from time to time, weeds those titles that have outlived their usefulness. But subscriptions are more like hockey.

In the digital subscription world, a librarian isn’t expecting her collection to remain the same for any length of time. She subscribes according to her current needs, knowing that the materials she has made available to today’s patrons may significantly change in the near future. For instance, she wants the latest and greatest of, say, news and financial databases. But in a subscription model, the constant churning and turnover isn’t just a matter of adhering to the latest dateline. A librarian may gain, or lose, an entire chunk of her collection as her subscription funding comes and goes, or as publishers’ digital policies change, or as patrons’ favorite digital devices shift.

What if we embrace a library model that’s part baseball and part hockey? What would such an arrangement look like? Print books, and some databases, would move in and out of the library at a leisurely pace, similar to ballplayers taking and leaving the field between innings. But digital subscriptions would constantly change on the fly: with new materials in, the old out, and the librarian playing the role of a highly tactical hockey coach, constantly matching ever-changing needs to ever-evolving resources. If that’s the case, the question isn’t “What do you own?” it’s “What do you need this very second?”

I can imagine a two-sport library, but there’s one caution. As you hockey fans well know, there’s one thing that can stop the rapid change of lines: when the game itself stops. The NHL and its players spent much of 2012 embroiled in a battle over money, and as a result, the players lost more than half of the current season. The one real danger in a subscription model is that it could break down totally and publishers could turn to some completely different plan. Well, if that happens, then librarian-coaches will just have to change partners and dance—on the fly.

In the tablet market, the push to unseat the iPad had competitors slapping an HD tag on every supersize device they produced, while Apple went small, releasing its seven-inch iPad Mini in October.

Nothing small about ebook prices for libraries, with Random House tripling prices for that market, with $28 titles ratcheted to $84, and Hachette doubling prices on their backlisted titles. Amazon finally devised a school model—but using it as intended violates their terms of service.

So what’s in store for 2013? I see three key areas: changing ebook business models, access to more content, and affordable new hardware. The first two points are strongly linked. By exploring new business models, we could access collections of resources, which have been previously unavailable to schools. To make this work, we have to find ways to overcome the roadblocks to ebook lending experienced by public libraries.

School libraries, I believe, will be the coming focal point for ebook licensing. We have strong relationships with our K–12 publishing partners, but now we must reach out to the trade houses. As the print market weakens, the time is right for schools to present a new business proposal.

The fact is, the big trade houses aren’t very keen on “selling” ebooks to libraries. To justify its $84 ebooks, Random House implied that libraries owned the titles, but applied so many restrictions that ownership was effectively obviated by all the fine print.

So let’s give them another option. Rather than seeking to own ebooks, school libraries should instead seek more favorable deals in a short-term lease market. Support classroom instruction with two-month book rentals, or license titles for three-year terms to avoid locking the school into endless recycling of the same novels.

If publishers are concerned about the impact on consumer sales, we can point out that these ebooks are for instructional use and not pleasure reading. By writing licenses that restrict ebook use in classroom settings, we’re giving up some access but opening up a huge new world of content. Besides, we can always buy print books for independent reading.

Finally, 2013 should be an exciting year for hardware. By year’s end, I expect we’ll see sub-$100 tablets, not knock-off brands, but fully supported devices akin to the Kindle and Nook. We might also see color digital ink readers with better support for illustrated books. But the main hardware issue will be accessibility. Two high-profile lawsuits in 2012 established that schools and libraries purchasing ebook readers must buy accessible devices. Currently, none of the E-Ink based devices (Kindle Paperwhite or Nook Simple Touch, for example) are accessible, according to ADA definitions. Make sure your district considers accessibility if it’s planning to buy mobile computing and reading devices this year.

 Christopher Harris (infomancy@gmail.com) is coordinator of the school library system of the Genesee Valley (NY) Educational Partnership.

Titles include Ian Falconer’s Olivia (Atheneum, 2000), Donald Crews’s Freight Train (Greenwillow, 1993), the popular “Sesame Street” and “Curious George” series, Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” series, and comics featuring DC superheroes such as Batman, Superman, and Green Lantern. There’s also 40 years of Doonesbury comics available and eight picture books from Amazon Publishing priced at $1.99.

The books have zoomable text for easy reading on any screen, and graphic novels are viewed by panels.

“Children’s books come to life with brilliant images, fixed layouts, and Kindle Text Pop-Up for supported titles to magnify text for easy reading on any size screen,” reads Amazon’s description. “Comics and graphic novels are presented in Kindle Panel View for supported titles, showcasing the artwork in a panel by panel experience that reads as the author intended.” These books were previously only available to Kindle Fire and Android users.

Children’s books, comics, and graphic novels first debuted on the Kindle platform late last year, with the launch of the Kindle Fire touchscreen tablet and its color display. This latest update makes all this content available on the iPad. The free updated iOS software is now available on the App Store as a 19.9-megabyte download that requires iOS 4.2 or later.

To purchase the newly available content, users must visit the Amazon website and download it through their account in the Kindle for iOS app.

The Lending Library, offered only in the U.S. and for free to Amazon Prime members, lets readers download one title each month—with no due date. While public and school library patrons must sometimes wait for popular titles to become available, Amazon pointed out in a statement that under the deal “there are no limits on how many people can simultaneously borrow the same title—so readers never have to wait in line for the book they want.”

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