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.
...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!
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
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
figures.. why do they insist on writing java apps for a slow embedded board? idiotic.
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.
'... 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?
That's about right. My iPhone is disastrous in that respect. Why? Because the developers put flashy graphics above UI speed. Any display change on an iPhone requires a brief rendered screen change effect - a sweep, or dissolve, or fly-away. The effect may only take a tenth of a second, but the device takes a full second or more to process it! Every button press, a pop-up graphic of the button. WHY???? There is more than enough processing power in all modern portable devices to handle all the operational functions of the device and to run the UI faster than any human could require. The temptation to use all that processing power to push the boundaries with chrome is rendering the devices even slower than previous generations of handheld technology, regardless of the improved hardware. Mobile developers: Back to basics, folks. Focus on what matters.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
TooMuchToDo, I think you should keep reading comments here. You'll find that many of us like our Kindles. Find a friend that has one, try it, and decide for yourself. It takes some getting used to but it is now my preferred method for reading novels.
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.
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.
You would probably like the kindle then. The current problem with the kindle is that they're not really built for the academic environment, in which reading is very much a task of information management. Without notes, highlighting, cross referencing, reference managers, a decent tagging scheme, a decent folder scheme, meta information sharing (references), and an open system to fill in the blanks, the kindle is going to do poorly in terms of that task; Especially with the comparable prices of eeepcs (cheap, tiny, sufficient battery life, and can incorporate all of the above). Now if you have many books that you use for leisure reading or the occasional reference the kindle, or any ereader for that matter, would be appropriate for you. As for me, I have specific uses in mind, and will wait until they hash out all the usability issues, or until someone else beats them to it (hopefully with an open system).
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?
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