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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.'"
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.
People who write in textbooks are the scum of the earth. I can't stand that! Take separate notes! Respect the text for future users!
You have a choice when you get to the bookstore, you can pick the text that is brand new, the one that was obviously used by the guy that dropped out in the fifth week and is nearly pristine save for a few beer stains, you can pick the one that is loaded with all kinds of great notes, stickies and highlights of the most important stuff or something in between. It's your choice. I for one would rather stand on the toes of giants than try to reinvent the wheel.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Only the rich kids are able to buy their own shiny new overpriced books, especially in this economy.
The rest of us may choose to add to the scrawlings already written in our moldy piss-stained second editions when we're not consulting the handful of pirated PDF's and HTML help files.
By the same token though, I don't understand the obsession that some people seem to have with keeping their textbooks pristine...
Clean books are nice, but so are the memory aids provided by one's own notes/bookmarks/etc.
I admit, I don't like others' notes in my books, because they always seem completely wrong, and are merely distracting, not useful.
I think notes and marks (and bookmark, etc) in books are mostly useful as pointers into your existing mental representation of the text, and sort of as a way of physically representing the act of reading -- e.g., it's easier to ensure you fully read the text instead of zoning out and skimming bits, if you're "actively" involved with it. [The same is true of keeping external notes, but that's even more work; which one prefers seems down to individual taste.]
An e-reader with a well-done touch-pen interface that allowed actually writing in the margins, saving the notes externally, keeping multiple note layers, adding cross references, ... etc, might be even better than a physical book in some ways, but it doesn't sound like the kindle tech is up to it...
(the speed of things like page flipping is also an important issue -- I find I flip around much more often reading academic/technical material than e.g. fiction)
We live, as we dream -- alone....
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.
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.