Slashdot Mirror
In Trial, Kindles Disappointing University Users
Phurge writes "When Princeton announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. 'I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,' said Aaron Horvath, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. 'It's clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.' 'Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,' he explained. 'All these things have been lost, and if not lost they're too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the "features" have been rendered useless.'"
Early generation of new technology has drawbacks. News at 11.
Were they uncomfortable and dissatisfied when their assignments vanished shortly before their due dates?
...are the scum of the earth. I can't stand that! Take separate notes! Respect the text for future users! And they always write stupid crap in'em, too.
Besides, they should've given'em to some real college students, like engineering majors. I'd love to stop carrying a pile 8 inches thick of textbooks around the campus every freakin' day. I mean, that can't be good for your back.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I sent it back in September.
The navigation was atrocious and slow, the books I would read cost more in electronic form than in paper form and had much more severe licensing than the paper form. Translating PDF media to Kindle form resulted in something much less readable than on a laptop. The web browser was pathetic. The display wasn't as high contrast as a 40 yr old paperback. The keyboard letter labels are too small.
The darn thing was way too expensive for what it was.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
That old story of NASA spending millions of dollars to develop a pen that works in space, while the Russians just shrugged and used pencils. Mind you, I wonder what the wood/graphite shavings would do to the habitat, and specifically the air filters...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I got a kindle last semester and got E-books for all my text books. I really enjoyed not having to lug around books from class to class. There are a few things that are not quite as convenient as text books but over all I prefer my kindle. The sheer weight difference is just that staggering. I use to never bring personal books, with me when I went to my classes, it just wasn't worth it. Now I have a large number of fiction and other light reading books I can read a bit of during short down times.
I have one. It's great for novels. I've read ten sci-fi novels on it so far. Reading from the first page to the last is no problem, and having features like instant dictionary look-up is wonderful. But I'm not sure they would be so good for text books, where you're flipping back and forth a lot. To navigate any more than forward/back, you need to use a cumbersome, slow joystick thingy.
Perhaps future Kindles with touch-screens would be good enough. The search feature would be pretty useful for academic purposes compared to dead-tree. But he's right: having to use that joystick to navigate in "random" directions (rather than next/previous page) is a pain.
(oh and a bonus for the slashdot crowd: the Kindle is just Linux running some java reader app. you can actually install a full blown Ubuntu system via the USB port if you like.)
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Not my textbooks, anyway.
I thoroughly enjoyed the time I've spent messing around with other people's kindles. I plan to buy one, but I just don't see them working for textbooks.
During my time in college, I never sold back one of my old textbooks, because I always "personalized" them so much during the semester by writing in, highlighting, and generally abusing all of them. Each and every one still sits on my bookcase, and I still reference them occasionally, as making them completely un-sell-back-able has made them exceptionally easy for me to use.
I think the student is right. You can't fly through a Kindle e-book the same way you can with a solid textbook. I suspect the Kindle is just made for more linear reading.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
The quote in TFA sums up my objections to eBooks as replacements for texts fairly well. Bookmarks, dog-ears, margin notes and all the other ways we interact with books are more valuable than you might think at first. For example, I lent out one of my favorite cookbooks; for a while it looked like the borrower had lost the book. At first I didn't think this was too much of a tragedy as I could order another copy online cheaper than the original. Then it hit me, all of my notes, records, adjustments and comments were lost! All of the stains, broken spine and notes have a more value than I could put a dollar on. Without a way to incorporate that kind of interaction into an eBook, I fail to see how I could be coerced to switch to a reader.
I believe the technology exists to allow interaction at the level that I want, but no one has offered a reader that even comes close yet. It seems rather trivial to add a touch screen, or even a small tablet that allows hand-written sketches or notes to be added to the pages. The Kindle allows virtual dog-ears, but they're hard to search and you don't get the visual interaction of a real book. I can run my fingers over the edge of the book and quickly find the dog-ear that I left 1/3 of the way into the book.
What kinds of features would you like to see on an eBook to make it closer to a real book? What smart ideas do you have that would allow a user to interact, annotate and generally use a virtual book like a paper book? The most important on my list are margin notes, underlining, highlighting (and I mean highlight, not inverse text), sticky notes (I have no idea how this would work), and dog ears that are easily locatable.
When eBooks can offer a greater level of interaction than we have today, students will flock to them. Who wouldn't rather carry one Kindle over a chemistry, calculus and circuits book to class? I keep hoping the next reader will be the one, but we're just not there yet. Perhaps we never will be. Captain Picard still kept dead-tree books around even though he had those nifty tablet thingiees.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
'... and if not lost they're too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the "features" have been rendered useless.'
I feel like this with just about every portable device these days. Am I the only one?
Get Paid to search
I've been saying this for years... it's just not the same. You really do *lose* something in electronic form, you just can't interact with the knowledge like you can with a good old fashioned book. I hope real books never go away!
I am the sort of person that loves tech, to an excess most people would say. My house is fully wired, I have a patch panel and rack cabinet in the garage. I can stream media to any room in the house and have at least 3 computers running at any one time (not including virtuals). Everything that can be computerised from my air con to the lights has been. However I will take a real book anyday over reading it on a screen or an e-reader device, whether it is a textbook or just a novel, can't explain it completely but it is just a "better" experience to me using a real book.
I'm hoping the E-reader from Plastic Logic ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_Logic ) will be a great improvement. Its display is said to be A4-sized, which would give it a diagonal of a little over 14". The biggest problem with most readers still seems to be the software, though. Either it's chock-full of DRM, or it's seriously lacking in features. Hopefully this one'll be different.
Take life easy: one bit at a time.
My life long hobby has been, and always will be, reading novels. I like my Kindle because I am never caught without a book and I no longer have to pack multiple books when traveling. For me, it works.
I'm not surprised that it is not that great for student text books. But, guess what! It does not have to solve all problems for all readers to be successful.
The University had announced last May it was partnering with Amazon.com, founded by Jeff Bezos â(TM)86, to provide students and faculty members with the e-readers as part of a sustainability initiative to conserve paper.
Why would anybody want to conserve paper? It's a very renewable resource. Tree/grass grows. Becomes paper. Paper rots as soon as book is no longer deemed useful.
If anything, we should be conserving plastic and chemicals. Those are NOT renewable. Mine limited fossil fuels. Make plastic. Plastic still exists hundreds of thousands of years after usefulness of the object has expired.
I'll take the real books, thanks!
I don't respond to AC's.
Mass of textbooks and the subsequent costs of transport over time prob offset this.
Somebody tagged this "defectivebydesign", but that's not accurate here. The problem is that it was designed for mostly pleasure-reading, not for academic study (which, as the student pointed out, usually involves highlighting, marginal notations, and so on). I rather doubt the wicked Kindle designers set out to thwart undergraduates. It's just that's not really what they were shooting for. Me, I'm waiting for an e-Reader that supports a wide variety of formats smoothly, and has a much better refresh rate. My Mom has a Sony e-Reader, which runs Linux and worked pretty well when I tried it. The main problem with it is that I read pretty fast, and so I spent lots of time waiting for the screen to re-draw. When they've got the e-ink refresh rate up to civilized standards (say, 500 ms for a full screen, maximum), then I'll be interested.
As a college student I don't really carry much sentimental value towards textbooks. I hate them because they're expensive and I would love for a cheaper replacement. Unfortunately the Kindle is not it.
I have a kindle and I love it for when I'm traveling and just reading a novel or a few articles but I tried using it as a textbook replacement and it was miserable. The difficulty of trying to multitask switching between pen and paper and scrolling pages with the kindle is too time consuming and frustrating.
If future e-readers and e-textbooks can integrate interactivity more effectively I might give them another try, but until then I'll take my chopped up trees please.
So now on top of paying pretty much the same cost for a textbook, I'm also expected to shell out a bunch of money on a Kindle to read them on? Honestly, if I'm going to get a digital copy of a book, I'll just use my laptop. If I am given a Kindle as some sort of experiment, whatever, but I honestly don't plain on dropping any dime on an independent device. Lets be serious, I hardly read the books I have. Just kidding. But seriously.
A significant % of paper is produced using pulp from old growth forests. Even when farmed forests are used, the types of rapid growth trees used are often vastly different than the native ecosystem of the environments in which they are planted.
The mantra for ecologically friendly use of resources is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". It's always better to use less of a resource then more.
That said, I have not performed any analysis on the equivalent paper footprint to one Kindle. I suspect it is greater than 2 dozen books, potentially quite a bit more.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
I'm not sure about the rest of the group, but my college math books would have been great candidates for digitization. In all of my math courses:
I relied on the professor to teach. The books themselves were fairly useless -- the examples were always too simple and the explanations usually had a lot of hand-waving. In any case, I generally left the books on the shelf until homework time, when they came out so that I could copy and evaluate the problem sets for practice.
Never wrote in the books, didn't need to feel a connection with them. Just copied the problems out of them.
I had the exact opposite experience. Went through all those courses in 2 years of aerospace engineering before I jumped ship to air traffic control (had calc 1 done from high school AP). My textbooks were my bible. I found that if I needed to reference something, I could usually open the book and land on the right page within a few seconds of grabbing it off the shelf. I sincerely doubt it is that easy to find info in a Kindle book that quickly. As I said in my first post, the Kindle seems great for linear subject matter like books, but for non-linear stuff like a textbook I can see it just being a huge hassle.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
You often hear people who have bought Kindles extolling the virtues of the unit; now I wonder how much of that comes from an attempt to squeeze value out of the machine and avoid buyer's regret by justifying the cost, even if through rose-tinted glasses. Despite all of the good press about the Kindle from a number of sources, celebrity and otherwise, you find cases like this where people have been GIVEN the Kindle and don't have much good to say about the experience.
http://www.tenjou.net/
I like my DX for casual reading. It's nice to carry a large number of books in a small package. I can easily convert text online to PRC files to read later without printing stuff out all the time. I like having a built in dictionary and text search, plus the wireless connection to Wikipedia is useful. The E-ink display is not as good as real paper of course, but I can read it for a long time and forget about the device, which is something I can't do on a back lit LCD. But, I find it hard to use for school. I don't really make a lot of notes in the margins or highlight stuff so that loss doesn't bother me. I just miss the ease of flipping pages. When I study I constantly refer back to preceding pages to look at diagrams or to reread things. I jump around a lot. This is very annoying to do on the Kindle, especially if you are viewing a large PDF when turning pages becomes impossible to do quickly. I'm sure devices in the future will solve this problem. So for straight reading, especially fiction or web essays/articles I love it. For study, no thanks.
I had the exact opposite experience...My textbooks were my bible. I found that if I needed to reference something, I could usually open the book and land on the right page within a few seconds of grabbing it off the shelf.
I suppose you just had useful textbooks. How novel...
I've had a kindle 2 since it came out, and it's great for any book that is read front to back. A couple of my books are referential -- like a copy of the Bible -- and it's a nightmare to use. The device is too slow to jump between pages, even with TOC links and search functions.
I've also read that the Kindle DX keyboard is next to useless.
Or shitty teachers.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Same here
I've never written in a textbook, or any other book for that matter, whether I own it or not. I've never intentionally torn any pages. Instead, I've always tried, sometimes rather hard, to understand the text and the concepts behind it -- and then I move on.
Have I spent my entire life doing it wrong?
(Or, perhaps alternatively: Am a prime candidate for getting real use from a Kindle?)
Kid-proof tablet..
Plastic still exists hundreds of thousands of years after usefulness of the object has expired.
Last I checked, every single example of 100,000-year-old plastic that was no longer useful had long since been dug up out of its landfill and recycled.
is the basic problem. That couple of seconds waiting for the page to turn is deadly. I trained myself to click Next a few lines before the end of the page.
I really hate the way there is no indication that you've clicked a button. I'd hit Next, then wait, wait some more, decide I must have missed it and click again, then watch the screen flip instantly, meaning that I had clicked twice after all, and now I have to wait for it to turn AGAIN, then click BACK and wait for that. Accidental clicks are the same way: you never quite know when and where it's going to go.
There is other bad stuff (search is awful, making reference books useless; the "web browser" manages to be worse than the tiniest cell phone screen; the keyboard sucks rocks; about the only thing that works well is buying new books from Amazon) but the glacial pace is what killed it. From what I've seen an iPhone is way more usable and available for less (okay, not counting the contract, but you do get a phone and usable web browser.)
A fair number of my professors photocopied the relevant sections from their own books and handed them out to the class. One mentioned that he made enough selling it elsewhere that he didn't need to burden his own students when we'd only need a few chapters from it.
I am an Australian, and as such Kindles are not viable for me, as they are not sold to Australian residents, and even if you get your hands on one, buying books is hard. Instead I purchased the only eBook reader officially sold in Australia - to my knowledge - the iRex iLiad.
I am loving it.
While it is not as high contrast as book paper, it is close. It is very readable, even for hours on end.
Navigating is made a lot easier by the stylus driven touch screen, though it is hampered slightly by the slow page/screen refresh. I find it more than livable though. It would be a lot worse without the stylus.
Once your in a book it is perfect, because you can change pages with the flick of a thumb. It is much better than holding a weighty book, and having to shuffle your arms around every minute or so to change pages.
One of the coolest features relevant to this article is the ability to scribble over books. With the stylus you can write on top of books, and your notes will be saved in a file associate with the book. It also has a highlight feature.
I must say though that I do not use it for academic research. Mostly personal research, and recreational reading. I personally think it would be fine for academia, but I don't have much experience in that field, so I can't really comment.
My only real complaint is the lack of books. The range is terrible, and the prices only 2% to 5% cheaper than normal books. As such I am getting to know and love the many public domain books. A great site I have found for this is: http://manybooks.net/
I hate buying used textbooks after people like this had them. Such a book looks like a library and a paint store collided.
Table-ized A.I.
While marking up a book may decrease it's resale value considerably it doesn't decrease the value of the information it contains. I used to stop in at our local thrift-store (urban) and purchase used textbooks on subjects that interested me on the cheap. They has all sorts of scribbles, but for the most part the information was just as good as the day they'd bought it.
Quack, quack.
Uuuhhhh....Anonymous dude? XP Pro X64 is $139 and you can use ALL the RAM you could ever want (I am currently running 8Gb on the CPU and 1Gb on the GPU) and I haven't had any trouble running anything on it except for REALLY old, like Win95 era 16 bit crap on it. If your hardware doesn't have 64 bit drivers you can pick up XP Pro 32 for $134 or XP Home for $89.
So please, don't punish yourself with Vista. I'm sure whatever you did in this life or the last you are REALLY sorry for and don't deserve the "wow, this makes WinME look good!" suffering that is Vista. Just forgive yourself and get a copy of XP. Your sanity and your hairline will thank you for it. Oh, and if you have one of those POS PCs/laptops where they give you ONLY Vista drivers? Just use SIW to find out who made the actual hardware (I'm sure it uses bog standard parts like Realtek and Broadcom) and then hit up driverguide.
Remember, the Internet is your friend, so use it wisely. I know this works because I have exorcised the demon Vista off of many a Dell and HP including laptops and while the drivers may end up a mix of OEMs, they all actually run XP now and run quite nicely, if I do say so myself. So don't suffer the hell that is Vista, be kind to yourself and go back to the goodness that is XP. And if your machine has X64 drivers you can just bypass Win7 while you are at it, as it will be quite awhile before XP reaches EOL, and I seriously doubt anyone will be using 128Gb of RAM by 2014, at least not on anything but a major server. So release your anger grasshopper, and let go of the evil OS. Life is too short to risk a coronary dealing with the soul sucking evilness that is Vista.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I wonder if an evaluation is part of the kindle-amazon program. Kindle could really profit from this, if they could design an e-reader that meets students 'desires'.
Sure, this generation might not entirly be won into the new technology (geez, we become old so quickly!) but the future students will.
Its also a matter of adaptation. New means, new ways. I don't know if we should make the e-reader as close as possible to the benefits of the real book, anyways. Arent there any 'digital' options that could make it a way better academic/learning in general tool?
Is there any difference between SIW and Belarc Advisor?
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
It's a very renewable resource.
Same reason cotton and wool are not considered "green" products but hemp is.
By the way, does anybody know how to open a document in Linux, on a given page: (a) in gsview and (b) in acroread ? In evince there is an option --page-label . But how to do this in gsview and acroread?
I like mine for casual reading and probably wouldn't prefer it right now for reference material partly because of how hard it is to flip back and forth between sections.
But I bet ebook makers learn from the shortcomings and come up with a UI that makes it easier to access bookmarks. Maybe a vertical panel with user-labeled tabs. Touch the tab you want and it jumps instantly to the right spot. Also a history list like browsers have, so you can get to where you were three jumps back without hitting back-back-back. They'll need touch screens and faster CPUs, not far off I'm sure.
One thing about the annotations that the trial students may have missed -- you could *share* them with each other. (Then again, being Princeton, they're probably too competitive for that sort of thing.)
Best Wishes,
P. de Fermat
I've just got myself a Sony e-book and while I like it it has limitations when compared to books.
Its great for books with a narrative such as novels, but for text books reference books it major limitations is the navigation. With these types of books I want to flip backwards and forwards across multiple pages. Find Index, locate Subject etc. You cannot do that easily with a e-book so locating information even with search tools becomes a pain.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Vista isn't that bad. But getting it for anything other than DirectX 10 is a bad decision. I really wish Microsoft had the balls to sell DirectX as a separate product, then maybe people would respect them more.
That sounds like patent fodder to me!
"Apparatus and user-interaction method for paper-like electronic book interaction". An apparatus and input method for allowing the user of an electronic book reader device to interact with reading material in a way similar to that used with paper-based books.
What is claimed is:
1. An apparatus for reading electronic book texts ... ...
2. The apparatus from claim 1 in which often-used pages get discolorations around the edges and borders.
3. The apparatus from claim 2 in which the device, when browsing through the pages of the loaded reading material pauses for a short (several milliseconds) period when reaching often-used pages.
4. The apparatus from claim 3 in which the user can make notes which can be attached to individual pages or groups of pages.
5. The apparatus from claim 4 in which the device presents these notes to the user by way of raised areas in a deformable input strip on the side of the device.
6. The apparatus of claim 5 where these notes can be used to open the reading material to the related pages by acting upon the raised areas.
Anyone care to build it? Sorry you can't patent it...
--frank[at]unternet.org
Same reason cotton and wool are not considered "green" products but hemp is.
Can't smoke it?
All the things that took Adobe Acrobat and the PDF format from from a good, clean, simple "Display PostScript" system to the performance-hogging monstrosity they are today were created to add back that interactivity you've complained about losing.
e-Readers support basic PDF and sooner or later someone will pony up the licensing fees to Adobe for the rest of the PDF features to bring interactivity to them.
Doesn't paper also sequester carbon (assuming the book doesn't get thrown away)? One thing it doesn't do is allow deletion of content remotely (except nuking from orbit, of course), prevention of lending to other people, etc.
I ordered one practically as soon as Amazon unveiled it, and I've been using it on pretty much a daily basis since July. I love it.
Is the navigation slow? Yes. Is the keyboard almost useless? Yes. Does it suck that they don't have folders in which to organize your documents? Yes.
On the other hand, the hundreds of pages of PDFs, articles, and book chapters I have to read for school are all stored in a single place. I can't stand reading stuff for any length of time on a computer screen; the Kindle's screen is much, much better. It also weights less than 2 lbs, which is much nicer to be carrying around in my bag all day in the city compared with my 5 lb laptop (small differences matter).
I found a torrent containing thousands of science fiction books and read several novels on the Kindle. I'm using Calibre, and I have it set so that each morning at 6:30 AM, my computer starts, Calibre fetches news from several sources and puts them on the Kindle, and the computer shuts off at 6:40. By the time I've made coffee, the Kindle is sitting there with the days news ready for me to read.
Obviously the built-in keyboard is pretty much useless, but I've always typed my notes separately anyway. Now, when I am done with my notes, I drop them in a watch directory on my home server; they are automatically converted to .MOBI format and put on a password protected website. Later, when I want them, I can just log into the site from the Kindle and download them directly to the home screen. This way I bypass Amazon's conversion service.
My experience with PDFs has also been great. I can only think of one file that hasn't rendered properly, out of several hundred. Occasionally if the original document is a larger format, the text will be small, but for most of my journal articles, etc., it is pretty much the perfect size.
It's definitely not perfect. I think it would be less useful for undergrads and more useful for grad students, who aren't going to be relying solely on commercial textbooks. It would be nice if you could take useful notes on the Kindle. It would be nice if it had a touchscreen like the iRex models. It would be nice if it had a lot of things. The question for me was, how long did I want to wait for all those features to become widely available? I am getting so much use out of the DX just as a reader that it has made it worth it for me.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Why are all these fools using Amazon's locked-in crappy reader? A Kindle simply isn't suitable for professional work, or even students. iRex iLiad is still the only ereader with *correct* pdf rendering and mark up.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
NASA tried to replace the books used in the mission control centers world-wide with electronic versions. The electronic version had methods to do everything you'd do with a paper book, except "feel" it. We had sticky notes, authors, readers, layers, callouts for running programs, shared views, remote control, text search across entire libraries, and heuristics to teach new flight controllers by watching older flight controllers work problems. And we were FAST, cross platform data, multi-language. After a few years of forced acceptance - no paper allowed - users slowly returned to paper.
This program was used by NASA flight controllers, engineers and astronauts world-wide. That includes Russians, French, Canadian and other space agencies.
It ran on Win32, Mac, DigitalUnix, Solaris, AIX, Irix, and perhaps others. I can't recall porting it to any other platforms. That was my job at the time, ports. The total project cost under $4M over 3 yrs. We were cheap and produced results. We taught Adobe some things too, but learned much from them.
Regardless, it failed because humans like paper books, not for any technical reason.
You can make plastic out of lots of things. If you have lots of energy, you can pretty much make it from air (but it is easier to start with something like corn).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing
What kind of fucking neanderthal uses page tearing for markup? I can't even imagine how that'd be useful. I do recall a number of books that begged to be torn up, but that was because the content was better forgotten than remembered.
When you take technology out into the cold, hard world, things fall apart. If you want to even come close to the experience of using a book, look to the XO-1 for some lessons in utility and hardiness:
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I would estimate the half-life of a Kindle subjected to the usual slings and arrows of class-to-class migration at 4 weeks. They don't talk about durability in the article, but I know from (tragic) first-hand experience that those e-Ink displays make 1990s LCDs look tough.
A Kindle is good as a travel reader of linear texts. For anything else, the contrast, fragility and slow speed make it highly inferior.
Do reading textbooks remind anyone about looking up `man` in their console? I for one think that people who have spent time reading PDFs and man pages on software would not find Kindle too much of a disadvantage.
I've had my kindle 2 reset mysteriously on me.
All the docs I'd downloaded over USB were gone, along with the notes I'd taken on them. They were the majority of what I had on the device, largely PDFs I'd converted to mobi format using Calibre on Linux. The docs I'd gotten over WhisperNet were archived and I was able to get them back. So if I'd indeed been using it to take notes I really needed later, I'd have been screwed.
Lesson 1: Back up your Kindle, or totally embrace Amazon's version of the cloud in which your device phones home.
Lesson 2: The Kindle is not a note taking device.
That last bit is important. I really like my Kindle, and it's neat that I can take notes on it and sort of play MP3 and browse the web, but it's a book reader. Period. Those other things are bonus features, and if you worry about *how well* the kindle does them, it is not the device for you. I have a kind of crude HTML mashup with my Google Calendar and mail stored on the device, and it's terrific to be able to consult my calendar any place I have coverage, which thus far has been almost everywhere I've taken the device, but it's not as good as a PDA for *calendar management*. That's what PDAs were built to do, and they're really the best thing ever yet devised for that purpose -- even better than smartphones in my opinion, largely because smartphones are designed to lock you into your carrier's value added services.
That said, the Kindle would be nearly perfect for *my* style of academic reading, if it only had a decent keyboard. But that's a highly personal thing. That's probably the single most important thing I've learned about technology marketing: people are different; they need different things and they react to things differently. The brain is a piece of meat; it doesn't work reasonably like a machine would. It has its own rules and they don't make sense.
I've never really understood people who dog ear textbooks or underline passages in them. The people who have elaborate systems of color coded highlighers and sticky notes are even more foreign to me. That's because my brain doesn't work that way.
I went to a parent teacher conference recently to talk about the volume of homework my elementary school son had. A few weeks later, my wife and I were discussing which assignments he should do first.
"He should do section E," I said. "That's what Mrs. Jones said."
"Are you sure?" my wife asked.
"Yes, I'm sure," I replied. "He has to do Section E handwritten, but he can do the flash cards on the computer."
"Where are the notes you took?"
"I recycled them when I got home."
"Why did you take them then?"
"So I'd remember what Mrs. Jones said."
And it's true. If I didn't take notes, I'd never remember something like that. As long as I taken them, I'll never need to *refer* to them. I've tried taking the kind of structured notes they tell you to do at Freshman Orientation, but it just doesn't work for me. The kind of pre-test cramming that some people rely on just doesn't work for me, I'm better off going to bed early. And the *note taking systems themselves* are a distraction. I find they actually reduce my ability recall. For *me at least*, the surest way to remember a source of information is to pay complete attention to it right at the start. This seems to work best if the information passes in some way from my eyes and ears to my hands, but once that has happened the tangible product has no value at all to me.
The thing that is a challenge for me is bibliography: remembering *where* I got a piece of information. So for me, the Kindle would be *perfect* as a note taking device, if it only had a decent keyboard. I often jot a few keywords down on the dreadful little keyboard and voila! I can find the place which prompted a certain thought. That's all I ask from a note taking system.
But other people are different. Many people seemingly need to visit the stationary store like a warrior arming himself before they can
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I shared the same experience with the same math classes.
After being taught Fourier transforms for the third time, I finally understood them in a dynamic systems course.
we are so accustomed to the idea that throwing more technology at a problem solves it better, that sometimes we miss genuine real world situations where the technological solution to the problem has peaked, and further application of current technology makes things WORSE, not better
voting, for one: all voting should be done on paper ballot. electronic, or heck, even mechanical voting, is simply more expensive and results in more attack vectors for election night shenanigans. so you spend more money on more technology and you wind up with less faith in your democracy and your government
ebook readers like kindle: i'm sorry, but paperback, wood pulp, is pretty much the bomb when it comes to reading large texts. there are lots of edge conditions: low lighting, etc., where ebooks come out ahead, but when you throw in durability, batteries, price, etc., wood pulp comes out ahead overall in the positives and negatives
i'm sure there are more examples
something like the automobile is clearly better than the horse. something like the gun is clearly better than the bow and arrow. but there exists higher technological solutions to problems that are of less quality than lower tech solutions in this world, and our technophilia interferes with our ability to see that sometimes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't mind what you plan on keeping your copy(especially if you buy new so the rest of the world can have reasonable used books. Your notes are supposed to be a synthesis of what you read in the book, and what you heard in lecture so you can boil down what's important into something you can actually study/refer to later. If you're going to have to read through the whole damned thing again just to get your notes you're doing it wrong.
Personally I would have loved to have not had to carry around all those wretched books all the time, not to mention not having to go to whatever pet cause bookstore the professor decided to give his or her booklist to that particular semester just to get gouged because they're the only people who had the books in time(since they had the list).
Certainly a kindle is a bit more fragile than a book, and you'd have to be careful(I can tell you from my days of trying to restore people's papers from a disk they'd shoved into the bottom of a bag full of gigantic books) that a lot of students aren't), but if you consider the benefits of having a search able book at your fingertips.
That's not to say that the Kindle(personally I think it's a pile of crap which only sells because of the value add services Amazon can add to it) is necessarily the right product, but e-book readers in general could be really fantastic for this sort of thing, presuming you can learn to take proper notes in places where notes belong and not scrawl all over your books.
I havent seen this action yet. But assume a certain number of pages are pre-rasterized while working with the current page. Even one page ahead does wonders.
Iowa's increasingly senile... err.. senior U.S. Senator Charles "I've Already Got Health Care" Grassley got a Kindle from his staff and is seen everywhere with it, according to an article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette last week. No word whether he's figured out how to tweet with it, yet, but hey, as long it can't do stickies...
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
SIW is a more complete info list, complete with every little piece of hardware/software on the machine. If it is in the machine SIW will find it and list it, as well as dump it to HTML or text. And since like Belarc it is 100% free why not use the more complete?
And OT, but don't you love how bad moderation is on /. now? You'd think phrases like being punished for a past life or exorcising the demon Vista they would have gotten the joke. I guess for funny posts we will have to put.....this is a funny post....at the top of it so mods will actually understand. That or actually come up with sarcasm and funny tags for the funky HTML used here.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If I'm going to be learning a new programming language, I prefer the books. As other people have said, you can highlight, make notes etc.. However, for reference, I'm really liking the digital versions I can get off the iTunes store for $5 a piece. I've been doing some hacking around in Perl the past couple weeks building some back end tools. Which is something I've not done in a while and the reference library I had were all Perl 4. So I downloaded a couple of the Perl books from the app store and have found them to be great to work with as a quick reference, especially if I know exactly what I'm looking for with the search function.
And while some may say, "You can use the internet for all that." Well I live out in the country and don't have internet at my house other than my iPhone for checking email. So having an offline reference I can go to quickly is nice.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
This reminds me of an old, short essay I ran across years ago about someone who really reads books. (Wish I could find it now.)
Anyway, a similar feeling was recently stated by every member of my family when we saw an ad for a Kindle or some other ebook reader. (At least I think it was an ad; who pays that much attention to ads any more. I pay only enough attention to know when to hit the mute button.) If my wife can't fold over the page as a bookmark -- a practice that makes me cringe since the magazine I subscribe to include a half dozen convenient bookmarks with each issue -- she's not going to accept any electronic book. I'm a PostIt-on-the-important-pages guy myself. Being able to cart around an entire library on a Kindle isn't much of a selling point, at least to us. That not a benefit to most people; only a few folks read more than one book at a time. I guess we're all Luddites. Either that or we've just grown too damned tired of the incessant push by corporations to keep spending money on the next "greatest invention ever".
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I have a couple of 100 academic papers and books which I should read sitting on my laptop, none of them DRM protected.
Does anyone have experience with how to read that stuff with some device similar to the Kindle? So far I tend to print out the papers and take them with me to read them in the park, coffeeshop, on the train etc, but using a single device would make it easier to take more papers and save some trees.
So -- are there any devices that are actually already useful and usable for this? Being able to make handwritten notes easily and being independent from power supply for a longer time would be two very essential features.
Paper rots as soon as book is no longer deemed useful.
Where can I get paper that rots as soon as it is no longer useful? Is this like the "this message will self destruct" from Mission Impossible?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Most papers contain graphs, mathematical formulas or symbols, and practical none of these papers are available in any other format. So although I can see your points, I am pretty much stuck with that format.
I would not mind a device that has the size of an A4 page. And ah, yes, I forgot one requirement: the device would have to be available in Europe. As far as I can see there is no plan to sell the Kindle outside of US in the near future.
REB1100 FTW!!! down with the kindle!
-eb00kl0rd
That the student in question feels like a Luddite just because he has a problem with "new technology for the sake of new technology"
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I own a Kindle. The amount of reading I do has more than tripled. It's just that good and it's that light and it's that easy. I like being able to carry a couple of hundred books with me. I like waking up every morning and finding my 3 newspapers waiting for me to read. My very elderly mother loves hers as well. BUT and it's a big but... it's not the right tool for every text based application.
If you are just reading a book from front to back, it's great. The screen is clear. You can read it at home or in the brightest sun out doors. The battery lasts a very long time between charges. Being able to listen to my MP3 music while I read is nice. Being able to purchase a book and then read it 60 seconds later is a big bonus. However, I would probably not use it for research or any kind of reading where I had to flip back and forth through the material. I wouldn't use it if I was one of those people who finds benefit from marking the text or taking inline notes. You can do that but it's cumbersome. It is not appropriate for medical journals or anything that needs a high resolution color photo.
Basically, it's the right tool for some things and the wrong tool for others. You just have to decide if it's the right tool for you. If it is then you'll probably love it. If it's not then you certainly will not.
Kindle DX isn't making the grade with students? Well hell, I said that it wouldn't fly back in May: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1227901&cid=27890519&art_pos=8 To the Kindle team: there are three things you need to change if you want to be successful with students... Color display, a touch screen, and an appropriate UI to let students interact, highlight, and take notes with their textbooks in a more natural fashion.
---As my daddy used to tell me: "You gotta be smart before you can be a smartass."
What about all the chemicals involved in turning wood into paper?