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Princeton Boasts Its Kindle Project Is Noblest
theodp writes "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, what's the noblest Amazon Kindle DX project of all? While other universities announced similar programs, Princeton is boasting its project is unique in that it will focus on sustainability by reducing the amount of electronic-reserve course materials that students print. Under the pilot program, $60,000 will reportedly be used to provide 50 lucky Princeton students with $489 Kindle DX devices loaded with materials for three courses. In a FAQ, students are told not to worry about 'this time of severe economic constraints' — Princeton and Amazon have managed to tap into a fund specifically endowed to support sustainability projects to provide Kindles at no cost. In addition to a $30,000 grant from the High Meadows Foundation, which is headed by Princeton alum Carl Ferenbach (who, coincidentally, serves on the Board of Trustees of the Environmental Defense Fund with the wife of Amazon Director John Doerr), a matching amount will be provided by Princeton alum Jeff Bezos' Amazon. The E-reader Pilot Program has more information."
How do you take notes on these things?
In all my studies, I REALLY liked to take notes in margins, highlight sections, and draw diagrams/charts/figures/etc.
How are you going to do this on these ebook readers? Even if they were pen enabled, they won't have nearly the resolution needed.
MOREOVER, I like to lay out several pages of notes and open books on my desk while I study so that I can quickly glance around.
I don't see this as being a benefit to students. Just some shiny and fancy technology that someone somewhere thought was good.
They have NOT thought out the usability aspect of this, just what 'sounds' good.
I just got my Kindle 2 yesterday. While I have yet to see if it sticks, right now I'm pretty impressed by it. The screen looks just like paper, and I don't think it uses any battery power to "hold" its image on the screen (it has no backlight, but neither do books). When it showed up, I peeled off the clear sticker with a printed "Amazon" logo on it, only to realize that the sticker was a clear sheet... and the "Amazon" was actually displayed on the screen and kept during shipping. Pretty cool.
I never buy books because I'm lazy and I never know if I'll like them, plus the hassle of having to acquire them and then wait for them to get to you. I've never read Larry Niven, instead opting to read the synopsis of the plots of Wikipedia, but I have read three short stories (Core, Neutron Star, and now in the middle of Flatlander) and I am loving it. I'm writing this because an eBook reader is better than I thought it would be, and it would probably be better than you think, as well. I like it and I'm impressed.
Isn't that a bit much? Are Princeton trying to publicly announce it's expensive as hell to study there?
iLiad supports markup. Kindle is only suitable for non-work or non-school related reading, i.e. fiction, etc.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I considered buying a Kindle last year because I got sick of having to manage what books I'd have to take with me to school, and got tired of the weight. But Amazon only had 2 of 6 textbooks that I needed, and even then they weren't discounted much (maybe this is peculiar to me), so I didn't end up buying one. If they got serious about higher education and managed to get a larger percentage of books I'd probably try it out.
That said, I'm not sure how comfortable I am with having my books in digital only form. This semester in particular, a lot of my teachers have been giving us a LOT of pdf scans of books that they own, and how would this be possible if they had originally bought that book on Kindle? Plus you can't loan kindle books to your friends or colleagues.
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
I don't know why most people think that Kindle is the only e-book reader available.
It isn't. It's not even the best.
Check out the iLiad: it has a bigger screen, higher resolution, much better connectivity (wifi, ethernet, SD/MMC, CF, USB host and device, which means it can read USB keys, but it can also appear as an USB key to a PC) and most important is very open: no DRM bullshit, it runs Linux and if you want you can get root access (without having to crack into your own device), install new applications or whatever...
Disclaimer: I have no relation with iRex, the maker of iLiad, I'm only an happy customer that's pissed off by all the attention that inferior and DRM-infested products like the Kindle get, while a lot of people don't even know that there are alternatives.
P.S.: on a similar note: the iPods are not the only MP3 players, not even the best ones. It's a big world...
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
What possible reason could there be for anyone thinking that a Kindle represents any sort of "sustainable" anything? Because it reduces the use of a recyclable commodity called paper?
If anything, the production of a Kindle uses vastly more resources than any paper and printing operation. In addition, from my understanding of it (being a Kindle 2 owner) the Kindle display has a rather short lifespan of around 2 years or so. And then it is dead and must be replaced - or at least the contrast is unreadably bad so it must be replaced. What is the lifespan of a modern textbook that is cared for at all well? 20 years? More?
No, I don't think there is anything even remotely "sustainable" about a Kindle and anyone believing that needs to have their head examined. Also, the level of technology required to produce a Kindle and the resources that go into making one are likely enough to feed 100 starving Africans for every Kindle not made. Now that would be a step in the direction of "sustaniable."
Paper is plenty sustainable. It's a renewable resource that can be recycled easily and cheaply. Obviously it takes some energy to manufacture and ship, but so does the kindle.
The "sustainability" claim is obviously just an excuse for something they wanted to do anyway.
That's definitely another option: http://www.princeton.edu/main/admission-aid/
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Good job manufacturing outrage.
You want "Most Noble".
The cake is a pie
Will they be able to keep devices after they leave school?
If so, Will they be able to continue to access the "e" books permanently, or choose to sell (some/all) of them to a bookstore (but keep their kindle)?
I wonder who is making this endowment. It wouldnt happen to be book publishers, would it? After all, they will get to save on physical publication costs, and at the same time prevent any of these books from finding their way to the resale market, if they get this to catch on. I'm also assuming that they wont fund the books for these kids following years of school. (Although they might get a 10% discount, just to give them encouragement to stick with the electronic books that they cant then sell at the end of the year to other students or bookstores)
Princeton is private. But that's not to say that there isn't a world of waste happening at the university level at state sponsored schools.
It really is sad that the education budget numbers always include mismanaged universities when such a small segment of the budget goes to what we think of most when we hear education - elementary, junior high, and high schools. At a higher education facility a 10% budget cut means people will have to use their laptops a bit longer and that new building on campus will have to wait. At a primary school it means that teachers will have to use their salaries to buy classroom materials and parents will have to raise funds for books if they don't want their kids growing up thinking that the most recent president was Bill Clinton and Pluto is still a planet.
This is not a reply.
=Yvan256=
The best e-reader I have ever seen is BeBook.
Wake me when I can download all my materials onto the thing.
As-is it's just a ridiculously expensive/fragile thing I have to pack in addition to my perfectly competent laptop and 40 LBS of other books.
or
Just give me the damn PDF's and save your money. For $60k they could have made a big dent in the production of a few high quality Free textbooks and save thousands of times that in dead tree books.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
But really I want to stress that the most important "feature" is that is not Defective By Design: with the Kindle you have to send your PDF or HTML files to Amazon to be converted to the proprietary and DRM'ed format used, which will then only work on a single device, no matter what license you have...
I am not a kindle apologist, but with the DX, that is simply not true. The DX has a built in PDF reader. That's another reason why it's a big deal, and a major advance over the Kindle 2. I think you need to look up the specs for the DX before commenting further, you're clearly confusing it with the Kindle 2 - it is significantly different.
Also, if it can read PDFs natively, that means you can convert pretty much anything to PDF yourself and read it natively. Just get the PDFCreator print driver - volia - DOC, HTML, whatever, will be converted just fine.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
As a fellow college student, I have to agree with you. I would hate to have to use a Kindle for my school reading. If the Kindle textbooks were cheaper by a significant amount (i.e. a factor of ten), then I might be forced to reconsider my stance for economic reasons, but even then I wouldn't like it. As I see it, the Kindle offers two advantages over paper books: lack of weight and easy searchability. These are both nice things to have, but certainly they don't outweigh the many disadvantages of the Kindle: need for a battery, annoying interface, a proprietary file format, etc.
For pleasure reading, the Kindle is even worse. When I read a book, I want to actually read a book, not some digital facsimile thereof. If I want to find something new to read, I want the ability to go to a bookstore or the library and browse actual, physical, paper books. If this makes me a snob or a technophobe, so be it.
Finally, I find it very amusing that Princeton is being all high-and-mighty about its Kindle project being sustainable. Paper books, if properly cared for, can last hundreds of years. I have some books that my parents purchased before I was born which are still in good condition today, and I'd like to be able to pass them on to any future children I might have. Will Amazon still support today's Kindle format 50 years from now? Maybe they will, but I'm a bit skeptical.
The Oxford English Dictionary attests both forms. Some uses of "noblest".
1616 SHAKESPEARE Julius Caesar (1623) V. v. 67 This was the Noblest Roman of them all.
1818 BYRON Childe Harold IV. cxlvii, Relic of nobler days, and noblest arts!
1976 S. F. HALLGARTEN German Wines vi. 61 The Riesling vine is the noblest that anyone in Germany has up till now succeeded in cultivating for the production of white wines.
These Kindles come with dictionaries, too. Maybe you could use one.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Don't forget about the fact that, with the iLiad/DR1000S, you can annotate/write/underline/etc. in/on PDFs with a stylus (although I found the supplied stylus fairly imprecise, you can replace that by another pen, like the Cross Executive (Capless) pen); something I find very useful while studying/reading. That said, the iLiad probably does lack something by way of user-friendliness, (compared to the Kindle) and is more expensive (although, if you don't care about WiFi, getting the Book Edition will lower the price significantly), but at least you can properly read (that is, with highlighting/underlining 'support') PDFs on it, as The KindleDX currently does not support bookmarking/highlighting in PDFs, only in their own DRM-able (although the DRM is removed fairly easily) Mobipocket-derived format.
Furthermore, they seem to be uninterested in supporting ePub on the Kindle (which probably has something to do with the fact that people could then go elsewhere to get DRMed content, rather than being forced to buy all their DRMed content at Amazon). Also, the Kindles do not support folders, so whether you have 40 files or 4000, you'll have to scroll through the lot alphabetically to get to whatever title you're looking for. Wonderful, that.
Finally, considering the total storage is only 3.2GB for the KindleDX with no expansion slot, having many scanned PDFs (with filesizes of 50MB+) is not an option either. (the iLiad supports CF cards up to 32GB.)
Having said that, there number of titles on offer as ebooks by textbook publishers is still very limited, so trusting that Amazon will make sure all course materials necessary in every university that participates in this pilot project would be a fairly gullible thing to do, which means that, if you have to buy the DX yourself, you have to factor in the facts that 1. you won't be able to resell books, and 2. you will probably still have to buy books in hardback, at the "normal" prices (supposedly the ebook texts will be slightly cheaper, but still very expensive.
On a sidenote, quite a few titles can be found on the darknet already, and most of the titles that are available "for free" are offered as PDFs, or HTML ebooks (which can be converted), so a big screen (like the KindleDX, the iLiad and the DR1000 have) is very handy when it comes to reading those fixed-size, non-reflowable ebooks.
The Kindle DX at least has the size going for it (it's bigger than the iLiad, but smaller than the DR1000, although the latter (still?) offers a fairly bad battery life), but I still wouldn't want it, simply because the fact that you aren't able to highlight anything on it, unless you buy from Amazon.
I'm 15 years out of college and still have some of the books on my bookshelf. Will students using Kindle get to keep theirs?
I got the impression that Kindle books were tied to an Amazon subscription, and if you lose the subscription, you lose the books. Even if that isn't true, will they still have these books for the rest of their lives? Aren't they in a proprietary format? Can you back them up?
Kindle (and iPhone) is cool tech, but it isn't Free (as-in-speech). You're rights to what you 'buy' are limited, and it can make a difference.
Buy the students a laptop or tablet instead.
I'm currently at a university that deployed a laptop program and there is sooo much more you can do with 200 dollars worth of electronics more.
I guess I come from somewhere where we don't have so much disposable income that we can get a Kindle in addition to our normal Laptop which students inevitably have.
People who say the DX will be great for textbooks have clearly never used a Kindle. I am an owner of both the K1 and the K2 and there are many things that it does exceedingly well. Unfortunately the things that it does NOT do well are exactly the things that students need to work both quickly and efficiently. What things? Well for starters:
1. Page numbers. The Kindle doesn't have page numbers like a traditional book... Instead it uses page numbering system that is fluid based upon font size. Using the smallest font you might be at location 3642, while using the largest font may mean (though you're at the exact same spot in the book) you could be at location 5681. Confusing? You bet. There is currently NO WAY to specify an absolute page number for the Kindle and no way to sync pages to a paper-based book. This is annoying, but manageable when using the Kindle to read a novel (or even a non-fiction book), but with a textbook the minute a professor asks the class to refer to page 542, the Kindle user is screwed.
2. Index and Table of Contents. With a 'real' textbook if you need to flip to the ToC or index to find something it may take a few seconds initially, but you stick a finger in the page and flipping back and forth is easy. Find yourself flipping to a section or the ToC often? Stick a post-it, or even a pencil in there and you can flip back and forth what amounts to instantly. With the Kindle it takes a second to reset the page every single time you change pages. Flip to the ToC = 1 second. Flip back = another second. Don't know quite what you're looking for, or have a lot of different pages to check through? Those seconds really start to add up. God forbid you have to navigate to a link in the middle of a page, 'cause the 5-way pointer works, but not quickly.
3. Highlights and note taking. Both highlighting and note taking on the Kindle are rudimentary at best. Highlighting in a real book = grabbing a pen and swiping. You can even use different colors to mean different things- instant metaprocessing! Can't do that with a Kindle.
Highlighting with a Kindle = opening the main menu and selecting 'highlight.' Then navigate to the first word of the section you want to highlight and click the 5-way-switch. Then navigate to the last word of the section you want to highlight and click the 5-way-switch. 'Just like that,' you've highlighted something. It's the same procedure to make a note, with the added 'bonus' that you now get to use... the keyboard. Yay. Imagine taking notes on your cellphone... 'Cause that's what writing a note on the Kindle is like. And forget about math or hard sciences... You'll never write that new equation the prof just scrawled on the board in your Kindle. Donâ(TM)t even bother trying. Finally, if you ever want to later review a note, you need to navigate to a little supertext number on the section you highlighted in order to even see what you wrote. Forget about scanning the margins for something you wrote during a study session...
Paradigm shifting devices are great when the paradigm being shifted to makes things easier and/or better. The Kindle is a positive paradigm shift for those of us who read a lot and want a more seamless (and cheaper) way to make purchases from Amazon.com. On the other hand, I don't see a positive shift for students who want to use the Kindle with their textbooks... itâ(TM)s just too cumbersome and slow. Fail.
---As my daddy used to tell me: "You gotta be smart before you can be a smartass."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The most important question before the Kindle should be used, can these eTextbooks be resold and loaned to other students?
If not, then this is a definite step in the wrong direction, textbooks are far too expensive and would probably get much worse if used wasn't an option.
50 * $489 is $24,450. Sounds like Amazon is even luckier than the students, since Princeton is spending $60,000 on $25,000 worth of Kindles.
--
make install -not war
Are you taking Peak Oil into account when you talk about the end of scarcity?
The ebooks themselves will last beyond the 50 years you talk about.. but there will probably be 20 plus versions and updated technologies of readers before that time.. and perhaps require converting the info into a different format now and then to keep up... The thing with worrying about that, is you get into the trap of thinking that many did when PC's started becoming popular.. I knew so many people who wanted a PC but were always reluctant to buy because they knew that as soon as they did, it would not be "the latest and greatest", so they just never bought one.
From a "saving paper" point of view, I think that is going to take awhile, but there will probably come a day when ebooks outsell paper books.. and even further down the road there will probably be a time when getting a new paper book will become so expensive as to be impractical.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
A notebook and pencil? Stop being practical!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
True, but properly used, it could make you smarter.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
"No cost". Right... I love it, actually — the spin-management at its finest. Here are two identical questions. Guess, which one is more likely to get a positive answer from a busy voter:
This is how taxpayers get suckered into paying for more and more stuff through the government — causing 30-70% to be wasted (through theft, incompetence, and — mostly — "legitimate" overhead), while handing the politicians (and their cronies) greater and greater control of our lives...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yes. I don't think Peak Oil is show stopper issue. It has been said said, "The stone age did not end when we ran out of rocks, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil." Examples:
http://www.nashvillefossils.com/resources/pages/historyofuse.html
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current."
Oil, for many of the purposes we use it for, may become more expensive in the near term. But there are *lots* of alternatives. I tend to like solar photovoltaic best as a solution that is quiet and has few if no moving parts, but there are lots of other possibilities for getting usable energy.
I'd be more worried about social problems caused by unemployment from exponentially rising productive capacity of society in the face of limited demand, and that is the very problem the elites (and others) of the world need to wrestle with. For example, how many people does it take to make a Kindle (or OLPC or whatever) for everyone on the planet, as opposed to how many people does it take to keep a vast industry going making and recycling paper? Automation as well as better design is ending the very notion of work as we know it, to the point where, as with GNU/Linux a relatively few people can supply everyone with high quality products, so any rationale for a link between having a right to consume and having a job is going away (which may create huge social problems in a capitalist framework). This was predicted even in the 1960s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
There are indeed lots of alternative energy sources, but none of them are as cheap and easy to harness as oil is. Photovoltaic cells currently require oil to produce, ship, distribute, etc. They are also prohibitively expensive. If society as a whole were funding the research and production capabilities to harness alternative energy sources then I would agree with you, but as things stand I believe that the diminishing oil supplies are going to hit the world economy like a ton of bricks.
Paper books, if properly cared for, can last hundreds of years. I have some books that my parents purchased before I was born which are still in good condition today, and I'd like to be able to pass them on to any future children I might have.
True story: Many long years ago, in a previous millennium, when I was a college freshman, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy was published in mass market paperback format in the US. (It was originally published in hardback in the US around 1954). I read it at the urging of a professor of medieval history, and I loved it. I kept the books through many moves and changes in my life.
About 30 years later, my youngest child entered middle school and developed a taste for reading fantasy. When he wanted to start reading the Lord of the Rings, I gave him my books. The pages of the books, being of newsprint quality like any mass market paperback, crumbled as he read them. He reproached me with the poor quality of the books. I apologized, if only I had known HE would want to read these books, which cost me $0.95 each 30 years ago.
I bought him new books of his own, on better quality paper, so that he will be able to give them to his son, I hope.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.