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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.'"
shuddap! the weight builds character, and prepares your posture for a lifetime of grovelling which every engineer needs when speaking to MBAs.
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
Oh come on, everyone knows the hand scrawled notes in the margins is where you find the most interesting spells.
apt-get install redhat please god - Me (take it easy, I love Debian)
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.
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
Sometimes the margin is just too narrow to contain your magnificent proof. Therefore you can just claim credit for it for 400 years.
Urban myth, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and_Russian_space_programs
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
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
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.
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.
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/
If medical students practice at home, we call it "phychopathic serial killer". Not all (or in fact; most) studies can't really be practiced as a hobby.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I agree. Harry Potter could never have made that potion on his first try if he had taken a new textbook!
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
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
Toes ?
Scared of heights are you ?
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
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.