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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.'"
> The navigation was atrocious and slow,
You should have tried the Sony "expensive crap book" or whatever it's called. There was a 1+ second delay between pressing the "next page" button and the next page turning up (during which time the screen was corrupted/inverted). Actually, you had the delay/corruption whether you changed page or just moved the cursor up and down the page. Hilarious. I asked the guy in the shop whether it was an early unfinished version and not the real thing, to be told snootily "we don't have unfinished products in our store". I can't imagine many people bought (or buy - is it still available?) that product, so in a sense it was finished.
Books are supposed to be cheap. Otherwise you'd just buy a netbook, wouldn't you?