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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 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
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 don't get this obsession with writing in books. You imply that only the best students mark all over a book. On the contrary, some of the best students don't need to go highlighting every single thought. By using the highlights of others, I think you place too much faith in the intelligence of mankind and, in particular, students.
'... 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.
One more anecdote to reinforce my point: Once upon a time, I had a real programmer teaching me C. He did not let students pass who couldn't solve a small problem (like removing the next-to-last element of a singly-linked list) using only pen and paper. Every lecture, the first thing we did was to turn our computers off, and do one of these problems. Then he did the same at the blackboard.
Guess what: we learned more from that than the rest of the lectures and the books combined. If the basic learning process is missing, technology doesn't give it back.
But the DRM in it is state-of-art!
/. discussion), we see commercial greed not only crippling freedom of trade and expression, but unnecessarily complicating the lives of publishers, distributors and consumers.
You might think you're joking... but global take-up of this technology is never going to happen until the US does something about its byzantine copyright laws. Amazon is perfectly able to sell an international customer a paper copy of most books, but is usually unable (or unwilling) to sell him a digital version. Which is, I guess, why I have yet to see a Kindle here in Australia.
Furthermore, when US publishers somehow manage to claim copyright on the work of a British author long after he is dead and his work has passed into the public domain in his own country (I'm thinking of George Orwell here, from a recent
I didn't make myself clear. I don't mind people having e-readers without decent speech output. That's fine. What Amazon is doing that's evil is DRM-ing all the e-books, making it impossible for me to buy their products and listen to them with high quality speech synthesis.
Amazon is quickly tying up distribution rights, and leaving the blind/visually impaired in the lurch. We need to be able to translate electronic media into other forms: Braille, high speed speech, or even plain old huge fonts with magnifiers on a PC.
For some reason, people seemed to care about the disabled at one point, and provided wheel-chair access everywhere, at great expense to business. Why is there no outcry for the blind and visually impaired? If Amazon wins this, and they wind up as the only source for many books, many people will be hurt. Fuck them.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell