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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.'"
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
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.
'... 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.
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.
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.
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/
But the DRM in it is state-of-art!
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
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?
Best Wishes,
P. de Fermat
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
The Kindle isn't working well? Good. Let it burn in Hell.
As a reader who is losing vision and the ability to read, the Kindle and US copyright bullshit seriously pisses me off. I no longer "read" books, but instead convert them to audio-books which I play at around 500 words per minute, using the totally awesome Eloquence TTS (the old ViaVoice speech synthesiser). I don't mind paying for the e-books, but Amazon and friends are leaving me high and dry. Their built-in voice in Kindle is completely useless, because it wont play fast and wouldn't be understandable even if it were, and it's not even enabled for many books. It's torture having to listen to it.
Fortunately, the Microsoft Reader format has been broken, with converlit program. I buy all my e-books from ebooks.com, and then convert them with some Linux utilities, and enjoy listening to them on my phone. However, I'm a big slashdot sort of geek, and this sort of hacking is natural for me. The vast majority of visually impaired individuals are stuck with no good solutions.
Every freaking building in the US that serves the public has to put a ramp to its door for the disabled. Why does Amazon get to slam the door in our face? FUCK AMAZON.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
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
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
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.
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
A bit off topic, but Baen has a program to make all its ebooks available at no cost to persons with reading disabilities. The books are in a number of formats, including lit, html, word, rtf, and Mobipocket. I'm not sure if Science Fiction is your schtick, but I thought I'd pimp my favorite publisher.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil