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Amazon Kindle Fails First College Test
theodp writes "If Amazon hoped for honest feedback when it started testing the Kindle DX on college campuses last fall, writes Amy Martinez, it certainly got its wish. Students pulled no punches telling Amazon what they thought of its $489 e-reader. But if Amazon also hoped the Kindle DX would become the next iPhone or iPod on campuses, it failed its first test. At the University of Virginia, as many as 80% of MBA students who participated in Amazon's pilot program said they would not recommend the Kindle DX as a classroom study aid (though more than 90% liked it for pleasure reading). At Princeton and Reed, students complained they couldn't scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages, or fully appreciate color charts and graphics. 'The pilot programs are doing their job — getting us valuable feedback,' said Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener. Martinez notes that Reed, Seton Hall, and other colleges plan to test the iPad in the fall to see if it can do better."
A fast flipping display and cheaper unit would be a better fit.Any $150 Chinese android tablet would do. The books would have to be pirated, but college kids have been doing that for ages.
The tried and true method of doing things that is known to work outdid the new shiny?
Amazing......
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
Coming from a generation that has seen the birth of the internet and school instruction online. I have to say, print is dead, or close to it, if the kindle or iPad have anything to do with it. It's promising that students gave honest reviews of the kindle as a tool for instruction, the kindle offers a lot of promise as a teaching tool, with it being a test and LOTS of room for improvement, maybe with all the honest and constructive criticism amazon will make many new improvements that will help individuals become better students. However, I can speculate that by shear performance alone, the kindle has 'a-ways' to go when competing with the iPad. Although I am not a fan of the iPad it can be a great tool for students. It will be interesting to see what direction amazon takes with this device.
Of all the things I've lost; I miss my mind the most. - Mark Twain
for scribbling margin notes, highlighting, syncing notes with PC/mac - and more, the Sony Daily Edition perfectly fits the bill. That device is the right size, feature list and perhaps the correct price point. Sony should be peddling that to the universities to finally gain some respectable foothold in the e-book industry.
My sig has been answered.
Well, according to several e-mails that made it to my spam trap, there seem to be many surefire ways to get a free iPad or Kindle. Seems all you have to do is sign up for some marketing promotions and surveys...
My blog
Sounds like Amazon was really trying to get some exposure/press. Of all of the feedback I've seen in TFA I would say it was "obvious". I'm sure now they have a nice good demographic targeted, complete with contact info etc, to spearhead their pre-planned campaign when they launch a device that does most of what was requested of the DX.
Disclaimer: I own a DX
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Using the Kindle, iPad, or any other electronic device is not going be wildly accepted by the college crowd. I find it hard to imagine studying without being able to mark in the book, fold pages, constantly flip through entire sections, or any of the features that make physical books great. Not to mention resale of DRM is non-existent.
The fact that Amazon wants to be able to reach inside your kindle and remove things, even things you put notes in sort of destroys the value of the Kindle as an academic tool.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"This is precisely the sort of dynamic, positive thinking that we so desperately need in these trying times of crisis and universal broo-ha-ha."
Seriously, Amazon is touting these basic features as 'upgrades'. Like Apples 'wait...you want copy AND paste???'
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
That's Seton Hill, not Seton Hall.
The greatest "advantage" to e-readers, or whatever the hell they are being called this week, is that publishers will be able speed up the scam of planned obsolescence in the college textbook scam/game.
Now my kid buys a $300 "required" book only to be told it has NO resale value come next semester because it is the "old edition". With Kindle, et al, that planned obsolescence can take place FASTER.
Now get off my lawn.
"You don't read textbooks in the same linear way as a novel," said Roesner, 23, a graduate student in computer science and engineering.
Honestly, I tend to agree. Not having tried a Kindle myself, my opinion means little. However, I strongly suspect that I would encounter the same frustration that these people did when using it instead of textbooks.
With regard to business school, Futurama said it best:
All I want is to be a monkey of moderate intelligence who wears a suit... that's why I'm transferring to business school!
That's like asking whether a sloth can outrun a tortoise. It probably can, but what does it take to convince people that there are a lot of other, probably better, options?
include $sig;
1;
Well they are completely right to complain about this: "they couldn't scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages".
You can do that with the products from IREX which, BTW, also happen to be much more open than the Kindle (no DRM bullshit, based on Linux, you can install new/better applications, etc.).
Disclaimer: I don't work for IREX, I'm only an happy owner of an iLiad.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
I am surprised anybody buys it. You can buy an iPad for about the same price, and the iPad does far more.
Arguably the kindle is better for just reading - still.
Sears has the "Aluratek LIBRE eBook Reader PRO" for $99, and buy.com has the "Ectaco jetBOOK LITE e-Book Reader" also for $99.
http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_00309013000P?vName=Computers%20&%20Electronics&cName=PortableElectronics&sName=MP3%20Players&psid=FROOGLE01&sid=IDx20070921x00003a
http://www.buy.com/prod/ectaco-jetbook-lite-e-book-reader/q/listingid/84607877/loc/111/213401968.html
So you mean they chose MBA students to test the applicability of a device for students' use?
They would have tried special ed kids, but they didn't want all the user reports written in crayon.
Blank until
The Kindle doesn't do Facebook or IM so it is not going to work well for what people are doing in class with computeresque devices. The iPad types too slow, netbooks have too small of a screen to really read on, and most laptops are too bulky and don't have a great battery life. Fix those issues and you should be set classroom use.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
Because it is impossible to pirate books to a Kindle?
See, the nice thing about the Kindle is that its easier to purchase legitimate books than it is to pirate them. That is a good thing, yeah there is still DRM and the like, but in all honesty, devices that make it easier to purchase and use purchased content then pirated is a step in the right direction because it means that they have finally realized that the customer is not their enemy.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
1st trial: kindle (fail)
2nd trial: ipad (will fail)
3rd trial: pen & paper WIN
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
Disclaimer: I don't work for IREX, I'm only an happy owner of an iLiad.
It's been a long day, I thought you said iLaid. I have a revolutionary new product idea.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Amazon ate my homework!
Students aren't the only ones who find textbook prices monumentally absurd. Most of my professors no longer require a textbook. However, they are required by the University to specify a textbook, so every student who buys it before the first day of classes gets royally screwed.
There also exist moronic profs who require you to buy the textbook, purchase a code for the online help, AND buy the study guide/homework guide, and then NEVER USE IT. I've found this in the English department more than once. These people need to be burned at the stake.
My other sig is clever.
So you mean they chose MBA students to test the applicability of a device for students' use? They should have considered using real graduate students instead.
Franzi Roesner is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science. http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/franzi/
I have the ideal solution for students, or for anyone who might want to enjoy reading a book and then sharing it with others when you're done, or if someone wanted to study a book and quickly switch back and forth between pages, highlight to your heart's content, and scribble notes between the lines or in the margins.
There is this newfangled substance called "paper." If only books could possibly be "printed" on uniformly-cut "sheets" of this paper, and then "bound" together with glue and yarn, and perhaps be encased in a protective cardboard or lightweight wood or even plastic "covers." Then, you could turn the pages without having to fiddle with gestures or buttons, you don't need to worry about batteries, and since you OWN the book and cannot connect it online, no one can decide the book needs to be recalled and remotely delete it. Not only that, you can lend the book out to others, or even sell it when you no longer find any use or enjoyment from it. DRM would not stand in the way of exercising either Fair Use or your first sale rights.
I know my idea seems somewhat quaint, but who knows - - it might just catch on!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
"It seems we need to make the next Kindle large, with at least 20-50 flexible sheets of e-ink "paper", and a highlighter/pen wand that allows for easy e-ink marking. Soon we'll have the perfect format. Ten years after that, we'll lock it into a one-ebook to one-kindle setup so that we sell more kindles. Who wouldn't spend $400 per novel?"
Correction: That's Seton Hill that will try the iPad, not Seton Hall, which is a different school.
Well, it doesn't look like it occured to Apple to address this use case so perhaps it's a horserace at this point.
Or perhaps some other dark horse will sneak up on both of them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I tend to find textbooks to be an outmoded form of communication anyway. In the classes I'm in we tend to switch between lab work, reading individual papers, reading smaller subject-specific paperbacks, etc. Most of the traditional thick / hardbound textbooks I've bought in the past year have just sat on the shelf. It's important background information that doesn't help you understand the political climate of China, why graphic designers work the way they do, or how to build flash applications.
Maybe Amazon should be targeting the smaller, single-use books in some way. Maybe buying individual chapters, so that professors can tailor a curriculum more tightly. Or having one-stop information compendiums that make it easier to buy everything for a specific class. Spend 100 dollars, and get the relevant chapters from 2 different textbooks, a few individual copies of relevant softbacks, and PDF archive versions of specific web pages that the class will use.
The ______ Agenda
This use scenario seems much more apt for an iPad, due to it's much heavier flexibility. But, only if proper applications are written to fit the student's needs better.
Or, they could just use a full out tablet with a stylus that's more suited for this kind of thing. I did it for math classes... it was wonderful being able to print off my notes.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Let me include a bit more of that quote...
"You don't read textbooks in the same linear way as a novel," said Roesner, 23, a graduate student in computer science and engineering. "You have to flip back and forth between pages, and the Kindle is too slow for that."
That rings very true to my own educational experience. Also, based on my own experience and from watching other students in the past, when you're looking for something specific in a textbook you're most likely going to flip through looking for a picture, diagram, or a certain page layout. You may even remember approximately how far in from the front or back of the book the section is you're looking for (ie. you may remember it's about half an inch or one finger's thickness from the back of the book). None of these visual cues would work as well with an ebook reader, and as Roesner said, would be a lot slower.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Another choice that might be better geared to students is the Entourage eDGe. If memory serves it was created with students, especially in science fields, in mind. It has one ePaper screen and one tablet-esque LCD screen, and apparently it's received decent reviews from students, though I have no personal experience therewith.
Recent article
Official site
Excerpt from article:
The enTourage eDGe is the first device to merge an e-paper and LCD screen to create a dual-screen device that combines the functionality of an e-reader, tablet netbook, notepad and audio/video recorder and player in one inclusive device. These two displays work together to allow students to access and enrich information in a way that they previously couldn’t. Students can access their textbooks and make notes in the margins or highlight text while they simultaneously look up further information on the subject via the Web on the LCD side.
[...]
The two screens of the enTourage eDGe interact so that users can open hyperlinks that are included in an e-book text and view the content on the LCD screen, or ‘attach’ Web pages to passages in an e-book to be referenced at a later point. Additionally, as the enTourage eDGe uses E-Ink technology for easy digital reading, images will appear in gray-scale on the e-paper side of the device; however, users can load these in color on the LCD side, ideal for viewing colored charts and graphs from course materials. A built-in camera and microphone captures audio and video content that users can store and play back later. Included Documents To Go software makes Microsoft Office documents available for creating, viewing and editing for notes or school papers. The enTourage eDGe runs on the Google Android operating system and backs up all content on enTourage Systems’ servers for safe keeping. The device folds a full 360 degrees and orients its displays horizontally or vertically, to view as a book, single screen, or prop up laptop style.
Everyone is trying to create their own iPod/iTunes like market for eBooks. It's a silly strategy that has little future because books and multimedia are very different technologies.
* The killer application is actually publishing your book as a computer file instead of inked on dead trees, not creating a device that is only remarkable in that it is compatible with your DRM scheme.
* Finding ways to sell your books to the largest market possible should be the goal.
* The only thing that differentiates and the sizes of the walled garden markets is the number of devices that are compatible with their DRM schemes.
* DRM is defective by design for most eBooks as it can be defeated a touch typist with some time on their hands. Music and movies actually require a much higher level of skill to crack.
It's like everyone missed Apple's secret weapon with iPod: $1 songs and $2 TV Shows - and tons of free podcasts. Pricing on eBooks, aside the occasional sale at O'Reiley is nuts.
In short, book publishers need to rethink the need for walled gardens. They add little value, given that portable devices that can read open formats have existed since the 1980s, and the current crop of slates and ePaper devices are not much different than a regular computer anyway.
-- $G
It's kind of a shame that Microsoft scrapped the Courier. Based on the demo videos I saw, it seems like it would have been a natural fit for something like this.
you could search for it.
I owned an iLiad for a while and, while it was GREAT for reading, its note-taking capabilities were not at all up to snuff for heavy useage. So, yes, while it CAN do it, I certainly wouldn't recommend it - the tech just isn't there. A few of the note-taking issues:
Slow to load sometimes
Had to specially format PDFs to give enough room to write in (a big deal if you read dozens of articles/week!)
Not all articles (in fact, not nearly enough) worked well with the special formatting
Pages are "smaller" than an actual notebook
Highlighting didn't really work
Now, again, the iLiad is a solid product, but I use composition books again now alongside a PRS-300 for leisure reading. I would argue NO solution is adequate yet for digital note taking.
Maybe Amazon should be targeting the smaller, single-use books in some way. Maybe buying individual chapter
Not a bad idea at all. Unfortunately, Amazon's impetus here isn't to make academia easier for students - it's to drive more sales of Kindles and Kindle media. Amazon loves the Kindle because they have a fat profit margin on books (shipping costs less than bandwidth, no material cost), and tighter control over distribution and dissemination. Combining your idea with Kindle content doesn't address the main complaint that was documented by the article. Namely, textbooks are not often read linearly. They require more random access, and that isn't as easy on a Kindle than in a physical textbooks (or chapter pamphlets as you suggest).
Essentially their criticism seem to boil down to:
iPad/tabletPCs don't have the first issue, but they have a similar or related issue. They're simply difficult to read for long periods of time, and often very difficult to see in natural light situations (ie, studying outside on a sunny day). Otherwise they simply use software to emulate the functions of e-book readers. So they probably share most of the other faults of the readers.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Never even considered it one. To me its nice way to read e-books with out the usual eyestrain from a traditional LCD. Most of all that i have read have been stories, or 'tutorial' style tech books. Flipping around would be murder.
Oh, i never wrote in my books in school, i had a notebook for taking notes.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You may even remember approximately how far in from the front or back of the book the section is you're looking for
Absolutely. Not to mention the fact that frequently used pages will naturally open up when you get close. Kind of a pre-computer weighted search. It's pretty amazing how well designed books are.
when you're looking for something specific in a textbook you're most likely going to flip through looking for a picture, diagram, or a certain page layout. You may even remember approximately how far in from the front or back of the book the section is you're looking for (ie. you may remember it's about half an inch or one finger's thickness from the back of the book). None of these visual cues would work as well with an ebook reader, and as Roesner said, would be a lot slower.
you could search for it.
Not always. I love my paper versions of old AD&D material. I got some rtf and MS helpfile versions of some AD&D material with a Core Rules CD a long while back. It was neat to search for specific text until I realized my spacial memory is stronger than my textual: I couldn't remember what certain things were called "Tome of Infinite Magic? Libram of Unending Magic? Oh well, I know it's in the misc magic items section..." I know which section of the book I'm in just by the pictures. I bet you could give a text-redacted version to any D&D nerd and they'd tell you what chart is on what page, but they might not remember what the exact words are to search for them, or what page numbers they are.
I know you young'uns probably don't remember this, but back in my day we had institutions called libraries. Libraries had these things called books. You could get any book without paying anything. If the book wasn't available at your local library, you could use inter-library loan. That was free, also.
You could touch a book without smearing finger oil on a screen. There was no DRM; no one implied you were a criminal if you read someone else's book. If you wanted to have a copy of a page, you could photocopy it and write on the photocopy, actually write, with real ink.
I know this will sound amazing, but you didn't have to have a device to read a book! You could just read it. Books didn't have batteries; there was nothing to charge; there was no battery to go bad and carry back to Apple for an expensive replacement. You could read a book outdoors; you didn't need to worry about the weak display of an Apple LCD screen.
If you dropped a book, it would almost certainly not be damaged. There was no quirky, limited operating system that had to be updated. There was no file management. You just opened the book and started reading it.
There was no early adopter status, with people going around implying they were socially superior to you because they had a device. You didn't need to worry about new versions of a device that did a little more, but just a little, because there would be an even newer version a few months after that. Books never became obsolete because someone stopped supporting an old file format.
You didn't need electric power to read a book. You didn't need to worry about exploding batteries with their poisonous metals. There were no charge cords, or waiting for re-charging.
There were so many books that thieves usually didn't steal them.
You didn't have to pay the huge Jeff Bezos tax or the huge Steve Jobs tax; you didn't need to contribute to a billionaire only interested in having more billions.
Hint: Not everyone cares about the politics of china, graphic designers or flash.
In mechanical engineering my books were/are invaluable. There is yet an online resource (and I've searched) that has as much material laid out as well as it does. Equations for four bar linkages, friction disks, thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer, etc haven't changed much in the last decade (or longer).
One HUGE regret I have is selling some of my books for pennies on the dollar. When referencing material that you spent a semester learning, nothing beats opening the exact book you used to help you remember.
Heck when I had to retake a course because I transfered schools I kept my original text book and used it in the new class along side my new book.
One thing that did irk me is that we did never use the full book, even in follow up courses.
ME 352 would have Book A and we'd use chapters 1-10, but ME 452 would have Book B and we'd use 10-20. Even though they were the 'same material'.
If I had the cash and was a professor I you could make a killing off of leasing books to students. Estimate that over the next 5 years you're going to have no more than 300 students / semester. Figure that 100 books will be stolen lost or damaged and you won't change from said book.
So you buy 400 books at 100 each, you're out $40,000. Lease books to students for $20* a semester. After 5 years you'll have made $20k profit and still have usable books.
My private elementary school had the some of the same books for close to 15 years. Each year you HAD to cover your books with grocery bags and take care of them. If a 3rd grader can take care of a Math book for an entire year, a college student can do it for a semester.
*$100 with $80 refund. They're going to come out better than if they bought and sold from the book store. You're going to turn a huge profit.
The Kindle IS based on Linux. The Kindle DOES NOT require DRM. You need to get your facts straight. And unlike the cheaper readers, the Kindle actually has a gigantic library attached to it through that free 3G connection.
E-ink readers are great for pleasure reading, because you read front-to-back. They are not good for reference books, because it is difficult to "flip through" pages in them. The search feature also is inadequate, as the slow screen makes interactive search feel cumbersome.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The kindle can search "page with multiline graph on the upper right, and weird diagram below it that has the equation I need"?
I agree that the ability to search is killer. The downside is what the GP was trying to say - often you remember what a page looked like that had information you needed on it. It's far quicker to turn to the section of the textbook it's near and just flip through a dozen pages than it is to try to come up with a keyword which will be on that page, and no other pages.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
And that's how I use my iPad. I run Shadowrun games and dabble in a few others. For the purposes of getting set up for the game, I use the PDFs and a notebook (lately I've been using my iPhone and Evernote). But during the game when I need to look something up, I know where it is in the book and can flip to it then back and forth a few pages until I find the right spot. With search, it finds every instance in the PDF and I have to slog through the search looking at each page until I find the right one. Maybe search is faster but flipping sure does seem faster.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I've said this before, and I'm saying it again, eReaders really need to support PDF's and Word files a lot better than they currently do, especially if they want to get their devices into a college or have anything other than a black and white book novel read...
It doesn't matter if it's a college text book, a role playing game manual, or any type of publication that uses complex images/tables/graphs/charts/etc you need a PDF or Office type of file (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) file and you need to view it well. The current ePub files don't display these types of content well and the Kindle just doesn't work well with PDFs right now and doesn't support other file types. Sony and Apple have some support but not complete by any means.
Ave Molech Setting
If there is DRM they have not realized that at all. They are just hiding it better.
Search is faster for finding what you're searching for. It is not necessarily faster for finding actual information, which is what most people are doing when they are looking through a document. Search is like using a good index; it just tells you where the subject in question appears. You still need to check the context to see if it's the actual information you're looking for.
Biggest issue I foresee with ebooks is that, currently, none of them handle math symbols correctly. Imagine trying to read an economics text or calculus text without proper mathematical formatting. If you can't, check out the Nook for an example of how it looks. Fractions, even at the biggest text size, are smaller than 1/8" and almost entirely unreadable. Sigma notation looks like gobbledygook.
Until that is fixed, I don't see any school adopting ebooks, much less a technical one.
They call them "casebooks," and they're a combination of (1) commentary discussing the field a bit, and (2) cases which have been exerpted to make them say whatever the the casebook authors are trying to say. Their quality and honesty vary.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I don't see the iPad being especially more useful since students can hardly take notes like a two year old finger painting. Even attempting to type on the thing is hardly practical either, and certainly worse than using a regular netbook.
On large books, it takes several seconds just to turn a page.
It can take even longer to add a highlight, plus the additional annoyance of using the little joystick for navigating. A stylus would be great if it were possible to use it with this type of display. I notice the same slowness on the Kindle for PC software (even on a fast machine), but at least I can use the mouse there.
The Kindle is terribly unresponsive for typing notes. It can't keep up with two slow thumbs on those awful little keys and you nave to pop open the symbol screen just to get a comma because there is no key for it (among many other common symbols).
Worst of all is the DRM. The Kindle saves each highlight to a plain text clippings file which might have been useful for study notes. About one third of the way through a very large (and expensive) ebook, I found that my clippings file was full of messages stating that I had exceeded my limit for clippings for that book. I guess they put some limit in there in order to prevent people from using highlights to extract the whole book into the clippings text file, thereby defeating DRM. What it really prevents is legitimate study. Due to this stupid technical deficiency, I should have been noting these passages by hand in a notebook. But the Kindle didn't warn me that this limitation existed, nor did it stop me when I reached it.
The Kindle hardware is an interesting novelty and I see potential in the technology, but it is not good for serious reading or for study. It's too slow and the DRM puts me back in the age of pencil and paper anyway, so why bother? Picking up the actual book is more efficient and convenient than using the Kindle.
But if Amazon also hoped the Kindle DX would become the next iPhone or iPod on campuses, it failed its first test. At the University of Virginia, as many as 80% of MBA students who participated in Amazon's pilot program said they would not recommend the Kindle DX as a classroom study aid (though more than 90 percent liked it for pleasure reading).
Because the iPhone was recommended as a study aid? Being the "next iPhone" does not mean it has to be recommended for study. Duh.
And honestly, with this being published... the iPad will have this ability before the kindle devs even get out of the first meeting about it.
That's the advantage of having a huge developer base for your platform. I'm betting the guys that wrote GoodReader are already on it.
Give me a graphical MatLab on the iPad and it will utterly kill all the other eReaders that exist in academia circles. Let me open and view CAD drawings and board layout and schematics and it will rule the engineering side as well.
Honestly, I was sad that the ebook reader in the iPad did not have a "scribble on the book" function. although letting me highlight a section and link notes to it would be better.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
There are companies that create custom collections of content for classes - chapters from multiple books, articles, case studies, the professors own material, etc. They call them CoursePacks. Of course, they are publishers so they market to professors that want to use them. I worked at one point creating a workflow software solution for a company that did that - very interesting project.
Yeah, because steve jobs will show up and kick you in the nuts if you dare to use a stylus.
You know, a pen shaped device that emulates pen like behavior on a touchscreen.
You must be a MBA!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
My own experience follows this closely. I have a Nook. It is superb for reading a casual novel. It absolutely fails at anything for reference. I've tried to use it for a few tech white papers and programming books, but without the ability to quickly thumb through pages, it's a no-go.
When they come up with a solution for this (with an e-ink screen, as opposed to the active lcd screen of the ipad), it's a world-changer for me.
I love my Sony book reader, for novels, but I spotted straight away that for rules for wargames and RPGs it was not suited, for exactly the same reason as the students with their textbooks.
I am amazed that Amazon did not spot it right from day 1
Slow refresh is a trait of e-ink. It will take many more years for it to be fast enough. A search feature would make this less of an issue.
It isn't that the Kindle has no ability to mark-up pages, but the ability is somewhat limited compared to "scribbling in the margins". Basically, you can put in what amounts to an in-line footnote at any point in the text and you can highlight (actually, underline) passages. Also, as far as I know these features aren't restricted in DRM-enabled books from the Amazon store.
Most likely because of the slow refresh times of e-ink screens, so mostly a hardware issue.
If you hoped that I'd give my opinion about the article, you'll be pleased. If you hoped that I was annoyed by the writing style, you'll be pleased again.
One thing that did irk me is that we did never use the full book, even in follow up courses.
I had a few professors who'd generally photocopy the chapters we needed. One said he made enough money off his academic work, consulting and book sales that he really didn't need to profit unnecessarily from his own students.
\didn't go to school in the US
Ed Lazowska (UWCSE professor quoted in the article) says this is "a crappy hatchet-job article where the reporter had an agenda and ignored counterbalancing input", and Franzi Roesner (also from the article) agrees.
My wife is a "real graduate student" (she's doing her doctorate work in radiocarbon calibration), and although she got a Kindle for reading scientific papers, she says it sucks way too much at that. These papers usually only come in PDFs, which the Kindle has a hard time displaying properly - the best her small Kindle can do is display one quadrant at a time, which is basically useless. Sometimes you can get the papers as an HTML page, but the Kindle's HTML parser isn't that great and you have to remember to download all the figures individually too - and even then, they're kinda hard to make out since it's rendering them in black and white.
She basically needs something that just works - you load up a PDF and it's readable, you save (somehow) or browse to a web page and it's readable. The Kindle is not that thing, especially when it comes to scientific papers. It just can't handle the formats she needs it to, at least not easily enough (and unlike me, she hates fucking around with computers; the MythWeb interface is about the extent of what she's willing to put up with)
Eventually she's going to get an iPad, which should be able to do all the things she needs it to; I'll get the Kindle then, since I read more novels than she does and it rocks at that (except it lacks its own reading light, which seems like the stupidest of oversights).
The iPad uses a capacitive screen meaning your stylus would have to be capacitive also and your hand (which is also capacitive) resting on the screen would have to be ignored by the iPad. So what are the chances of that working? Of course students could hold the stylus while wearing non conductive gloves which would be enormously practical I'm sure.
It is disappointing to see Amazon finding out only now that engineers will want to scribble on pages, highlight items, need color, etc.
Amazon employs hundreds if not thousands of engineers, most if not all of which could have told senior executives this.
Unfortunately, many companies in Silicon Valley are being run by executives who have forgotten their companies were built by engineers, and consulting with them once in a while might be useful.
This is not meant to be flame-bait. It is from personal experience and the experiences of other engineers, e.g., Bob Colwell and the inability of Intel to acknowledge the failure of the Itanium processor line before it wasted billions of dollars and several years of engineering time (read Bob's book The Pentium Chronicles for more detail.)
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
I'm not surprised we are discussing the issues of searching through electronic documentation. I have had electronic documentation for years with computer software (early 1990s), and this was always my issues. The search function is great providing you have the *EXACT* phrase your looking for. Even then, you may come up with dozens or dozens of results.
Even worse, is when you are searching for some particular topic, and absolutely nothing comes up, or what does come up is complete wrong and so far out of left field that is isn't even in the same ballpark, let alone the same state. Try and find how to operate "scissors" when they are indexed only as "shears." Extraordinary frustrating.
My university went to e-texts for their undergrad programs. It has been the most annoying switch that I have had to make. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm extremely spatial, to try and find stuff yet again, becomes a complete pain in the ass; yet to flip back between pages or chapters in physical books is less time consuming than on the electronic version. What is even worse, you don't own the text book, we have a 4 year license to view the text on only two computers.
I've even had profs comment that I have never used any of my e-texts as references in my papers, and I've told them, if I have something that is in hard-copy, I will use that first over anything that is electronic. The electronic sources are just simply cumbersome; I don't want to be switching to a dozen different windows when I'm writing a paper.
Netbooks are way cheaper and more versatile. Ipads might make the versatile category, still too expensive. Remember these are college kids. Their money priorities are elsewhere. Give them cheap college text and a versatile machine (plays tunes and movies) and you will have a seller. They need an atom or similar processor with touch color screen and sound with 16 gb storage maybe via sd card. Something really cheap ...250 max. Netbook works great for my daughter. Has a cam and she records the lectures. All using Linux. Uses that to review before exams. Wife has a Kindle. She loves her novels, and its great for her. Daughter, not so much.
"You don't read textbooks in the same linear way as a novel," said Roesner, 23, a graduate student in computer science and engineering. "You have to flip back and forth between pages, and the Kindle is too slow for that."
This is very true. While I don't own a Kindle, I do have and use two other (different manufacturers) eInk readers, and can testify to the same thing: they are absolutely wonderful for recreational reading, precisely because you just go through the book from start to end 99% of the time you spend with it; for the rest, the available functionality is adequate. But a textbook or any sort of technical book/reference, especially with hyperlinks? Forget it. That's what a netbook (or a tablet) is for.
A dedicated reader could do the trick, but it needs to be as responsive as a tablet (at which point it is pretty much a tablet, anyway). Perhaps Pixel Qi screens can give us the best of both worlds there...
IMHO a fat book is still the BEST way to lay a bedrock of knowledge in some general area for further study. Once you know the basics, THEN you can graze. Granted, many people never bother to lay a foundation and still manage to wing it.
You might be able to annotate, but until the books are really designed to be functional from a handheld device it is painful.
As a personal example, I have a 1,000 page PDF of a code book on my iPad. Or, I did for an hour. Book couldn't load reliably, couldn't navigate the two-tiers of TOCs, and it just wasn't a logical arrangement. The navigation requires a whole new level of abstraction rather than just forward/back; search doesn't come close.
(No, the PDF wasn't a legal offering from the publisher. The publisher refuses to offer anything electronic for this product other than a web-based subscription of inferior grade content...)
Pretty much anybody who has used an e-book reader for more than five minutes could tell how this marketing effort would end. Fanboys excluded, because no doubt a Kindle lover or an iPad tit will be along any minute to relate how they now use only their device of devotion, and say how great it works for reference material.
E-BOOK READERS ARE SHIT FOR REFERENCE MATERIAL!!!!
Learn it.. Live with it. The electronic backpack is not here yet.
A paper book has every reader device beaten hands down for text books. Novels are a different story.
In all honesty, they are great for pleasure reading. I've gone through I can't remember how many books in the year and a bit I have had mine. Never a second of buyer's remorse. But for reference material, forget it.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Hear , hear. Finding a few worked examples for a given topic is nigh-on impossible online!
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
I'm interested in an e-reader for textbooks because I have collected many from Undergrad and now Grad (Masters) that I am holding onto and they take up space. I don't highlight/fold my books because it drives me crazy when the book is damaged. Right now I like the Kindle e-ink technology for reading, it seems easier on my eyes than an LCD (I have used my dad's Kindle). I don't like the iPad that much, I have used it in the apple store but I don't like the iBook reading experience. Also I understand publishers are planning to make their own apps for some titles to help formatting.
What I want is a kindle with color (it doesn't need to be magazine quality) because text books have color diagrams/charts where the color is required for the understanding. At the very lease I need newspaper/textbook style color. Also I do need mathematical formulas as well because I do have Calculus Books (which I never use but want to hold onto anyway) and Discrete Math Books (once in a while...). For a text book the kindle screen (not the DX) is too small. I want to at least be able to see a full text book page with the images/text.
I haven't tried annotations/searching. But it's not a killer. Usually with computer science I know what I'm looking for and I can tell based on the chapter headings. So going to the table of contents to find the chapter and turning a few pages is no problem. I am anal about my books. If I buy a book and there is a mark/line/folded/ripped page/dent on the cover when I buy it, I will return it and get another one. It drives me crazy when I tear pages (which sometimes happen when flipping them). The Kindle would be great because I wouldn't have to worry about a damaged book. and the annotations might let me annotate whereas I would never do that to a physical book.
But it would hurt to not have the the physical book because sometimes I do remember content by its position in the book. But phrase search might be okay since I may be able to remember a phrase to find a page. Also if you could search on a topic and have it return references to multiple books in your collection so you could cross reference the material that would be cool.
The other thing I want the kindle for besides text books is programming books. It would be great to be able to select/copy/paste/e-mail the source code examples instead of typing them or fumbling with a website/cd. I would definitely buy all the reference books for the Programming Languages I use (ie Bjarne's C++, K+R C, The Camel Book) and definitely buy Code Complete. Many books are excellent references and it would be great to have them all searchable in one place.
As a Grad student, some of my classes are based on ACM papers. And if I was to pursue a PhD, I would be reading hundreds of papers. Whatever device a PhD students has would need to be able to read the scientific journal for that field. Ie ACM seems to publish many of the interesting Computer Science papers (I know not technically a journal), but I would need an e-reader to link with their digital library if it was going to be super useful to me were I going for a PhD. I had one class this semester where it was about 25 papers and no textbook (all from the ACM).
As a professional programmer, I need the various how to guides/tutorials for specific technologies/languages, programming language references, and the occasional textbook (especially algorithms).
That rings very true to my own educational experience. Also, based on my own experience and from watching other students in the past, when you're looking for something specific in a textbook you're most likely going to flip through looking for a picture, diagram, or a certain page layout. You may even remember approximately how far in from the front or back of the book the section is you're looking for (ie. you may remember it's about half an inch or one finger's thickness from the back of the book). None of these visual cues would work as well with an ebook reader, and as Roesner said, would be a lot slower.
And the Kindle falls down badly on the way you often use reference texts, where you would go to a particular part of the text, possibly from the index, based on a particular search criterion, then find you need to jump back a couple chapters to where it explains something that's glossed over in the material where you were looking, or flip back and forth between two or three possibly widely-separated points in the text that you are using in that combination only for the particular task you're doing right then, and probably never again, so bookmarks wouldn't help.
It's still much easier to flip back and forth through large chunks of a book if it's hardcopy in your hand, and it's likely to remain that way for some time.
Of course students could hold the stylus while wearing non conductive gloves which would be enormously practical I'm sure.
You know, most universities have heat. I'm guessing up there in greenland you guys must hold classes out on the ice.
Here in the USA, 98.976% of all students dont wear gloves while in class. I'm betting that most of Europe and the rest of the world the same ratio is common. Although Russian Gulag schools in the Ukrane might still not have heat.
I am unsure of Antarctica... They might always wear gloves, but last I knew they did not have a University.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
students complained they couldn't scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages
Good. It's a book. Stop defacing it.
Bloody vandals.
Nothing worse than buying a second-hand textbook and finding out the fuckwit that owned it before you has destroyed it through inept, irrelevant and inaccurate highlighting and notes.
And no, buying new isn't an option when you're a student with all your income going on accommodation, food and condoms.
There's no real substitute for physical bookmarks either. If you are adding colored tabs, bits of paper, even highlighting as you go along, that helps create that spatial map in your head for where things are. I find that doing so electronically does not give me the same such map in my head.
I'm now pretty much forced to use PDFs of papers entirely. I'm trying to do the lit review for my Master's thesis, and it's just not feasible to print 100 research papers and have them lying around. The best I've been able to do is to put the PDF side-by-side with the document I'm writing on a big widescreen monitor. I'd probably prefer having it in front of me, but that's what I have to work with.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I'm a statistician, and I have many of my most useful statistics books sitting on my shelf at my desk at work, and I refer to them from time to time (maybe once or twice a month). Most or all of my coworkers are the same way. I'm not sure how this would work in a Kindle/iPad textbook environment - would I just keep an iPad at work? (Uh, no.) Have to bring my iPad to work every day? That seems kind of cumbersome - I wouldn't need it every day for textbooks, and I can't see why I'd otherwise need it at work, and you can bet the day I'd need something from a textbook in it is the day I would've left it at home or something. (And I haven't even gotten into the problems I'd run into with security... "Hey! That Kindle/iPad looks like company property!")
Wow, I came to this conclusion within minutes of owning a Kindle DX and I strongly suspected it before it even arrived. Yes, textbook models are largely becoming obsolete. Only crazy ppl in California think that every student just needs pdfs of the textbooks for e-learning. sigh...
On a related note, check out the Entourage Edge concept. I don't know that they've got everything right yet, but this is on a better track than the Kindle DX.
Here is an excellent blog post by Qualcomm's VP of Education Technology on the 21st century textbook.
Come play Moral Decay!
Even better... I found an e-mail from a guy in Nigeria that says all I have to do is send him my Social security number, 'Routing Number' and 'Account Number' from a check, and fax him a copy of my driver's license and passport, and he'll send me one for free, along with $100,000 cash, for passing $1,000,000 for him.
Then I don't have to go through all the trouble of filling out some survey or completing offers.
I do the same thing when reading PDFs on the PC:
I often go back later and remember only a vague picture of the information that I wanted, and (as you note) using the search tool is not always useful.
So, while reading, I just tend to keep track of where I'm at in the book. Whether it be a chapter number, or the position of the scroll bar, or even the shape of the table of contents on the left hand side. This keeps me roughly aware of where I'm at in the document as I read it. Later, I can quickly jump to approximately that same point and do some quick paging around to find the exact passage that I'm looking for.
Works for me, but then I've never had to learn to make efficient use of textbooks since I've done nearly all of my learning for the past 16 years using a computer. Not having to unlearn any familiarity with textbooks might have helped me with that...
(Alas, this doesn't work on a Kindle since it's so slow for non-linear reading, but that's more a problem of the display tech than of electronic books in general.)
Kid-proof tablet..
Because it is impossible to pirate books to a Kindle?
It is trivially easy to read pirated books on Kindle. Not that I have done this, mind you, but I hear that there are websites out there with ebook torrents on them, and there's this program you can get to convert them into a Kindle-readable format.
The Kindle device doesn't require DRM, the Amazon bookstore does. These are two separate things that people seem to keep mixing up.
complained they couldn't scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages
but... but.. I read stuff on "iKindle" on my iPhone, and I can easily highlight passages, and put notes in it... how is it that a "real" kindle makes it more difficult to do these things?!?!?
I have a Kindle 2 and it is often very slow when doing text searching. The whole interface is just sluggish and frustrating to use. The physical keyboard is terrible too. Everything just lacks polish, and they haven't released a new firmware update for a while now.
Surely you need books the next semester, and even a year later. Unless each book has information on everything, and it certainly wasn't this way in maths.
Actually in maths, we only really got text books for the first year, and we would use them all the way through the honours degree. We would use other material (such as printed questions, and lots of notes), for the higher courses, such as differential equations 3, and stochastic modelling. This was at a University in Australia.
The parent makes an interesting point -- that searching is done on electronic devices by text, but not all of our memory cues which aid in searching are textual. I am absolutely sure that arrangement of information on a page, the presence or absense of a particular graphic, or the color of text (or, my highlighting of it :-) were all factors in how I remembered information when I was in academia and had to study for exams. And I made a bit of pocket money selling my color-highlighted and carefully indented/organized study sheets to other students studying for the same exams, too, so I wasn't the only one who found visual presentation useful.
In the case of color, that entire aspect of visual presentation is missing on some electronic readers including the Kindle, thereby giving me one less memory aid.
Clearly the point I made sailed completely over your head. Capacitive screens do not work on pressure, but on conductance. Just resting your hand on the iPad while writing would cause multiple points of contact and confuse the hell out of the device. Watch this review of such a stylus in action and see if the clue sinks in - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QSi59bMfWY. You would have to write without touching the screen, wear gloves or put some non conductive surface under your hand to take notes. Utterly impractical and completely stupid. Even if the problem of writing could be overcome, capacitive screens aren't very precise which means you have to write in large letters with thick lines.
Any sort of tablet device that expects to be used for note taking must support a resistive touch screen or some kind of hybrid resistive / capacitive screen.
So you mean they chose MBA students to test the applicability of a device for students' use? They should have considered using real graduate students instead. As a grad student myself, I can say that the only way I would consider a kindle or ipad for my own use is if someone gave it to me for free...
It doesn't matter if it were MBA students or MS/Ph.d EE students since they were testing for usability in the classroom. Probably the study originally focused on MBAs hoping that a positive mark would lead to adoption as a (future) corporate tool.
I sadly reached the same conclusion after buying my Kindle 2 last year. It is excellent for pleasure reading, but horrible for studying. When studying you need to fast-flip through the book, and when doing research, you need to scan dozens of pages at a time to get a sense of structure before zooming in into key areas. None of that is possible with the Kindle.
Let's just say that, given I do very little pleasure reading, but a lot of technical reading, studying and researching (combined with its sub-par support for PDF documents), my Kindle 2 has been the worst investment I've ever made in electronics. I don't think I've ever bought anything that proved to be so useless for the task I intended to use (partly my fault for not doing enough research on this thing.)
In fact, based on my experience with the Kindle ergonomics, it cannot be done with a keypad. You need to go full touch screen with the ability to flip pages as fast as possible... AND (unlike the kindle) with the ability to see really large chunks of text (as close as possible with the original printed versions.)
The iPad (or something similar to it) would pave the way to electronic readers with the ergonomics necessary for studying and researching. The Kindle is really good for pleasure reading, it is really nice. But that's it. And I cannot imagine anyone wanting to pay $489 for it considering that for a few more bucks you can get an iPad (which with its touch screen could prove more suitable for the type of text reading and scanning required for studying and researching.)
I mean, really, I could understand in 2009, but now, who would in his/her right mind pay that much for a Kindle? Amazon is pretty much stuck with spoiled goods on this one.
MBA students know how to read?
There were some real graduate students in the mix:
"You don't read textbooks in the same linear way as a novel," said Roesner, 23, a graduate student in computer science and engineering.
Honestly, I tend to agree. Not having tried a Kindle myself, my opinion means little. However, I strongly suspect that I would encounter the same frustration that these people did when using it instead of textbooks.
well this is exactly why a properly implemented ebook reader would be superior to a textbook. so i'm doing an assignment and cannot remember the page that has the formula for attaching the friggin laser to the sharks head, do I. A) look at the index shorten my query to 50 or so pages and search them? or B) use the wonders of technology to search for "friggein laser" and see where i get? now yes annotation marks can be used in a textbook, but theres no reason they could not be used in a reader and well, they require you to know what you are going to need to find later. i've never used a kindle so have no idea if any of this is possible but, instead of passing them over as inferior, we should find how "real"books beat them and implement better ways of doing such things.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Who never highlighted or made margin notes in any of my books in college? I never saw the point, really, if I was going to study pieces of a chapter I'd go download the professor's lecture notes... I don't even really remember having the book open during class - I just brought it in case someone started referencing a problem or a diagram. In any case, it's always felt weird to me to mark up a book...
Still sounds like the kindle would suck as a textbook for many things just because of the lack of color and the slowness of page changes, but personally the other "issues" wouldn't affect me at all.
It's no use to try to promote the Kindle when its main problem lies with the publishers.
First e-books more expensive than their dead-tree version: stupid, unecological and greedy. Then the @#$%& "region" problem: depending on where you live, especially outside the Empire, lots of books may not be available to buy so the only option is, as usual, "piracy".
It seems that the books publisher want to make all the mistakes that the music and film publishers made before them.
--
El Guerrero del Interfaz
Both the Kindle and the iPad are a joke when it comes to academic work. At the very least, they need to duplicate the kind of functionality you can get from bluebeam and onenote running on a convertible tablet PC:
- freehand inking on pdfs
- the ability to TYPE pop-up notes
- audio recordings you can sync with notes a la onenote
- hotkeys for various highlighter colors (I use a 9-color system which would be impractical with physical highlighters)
- hierarchical bookmarks allowing you to make clickable outlines of an articlegreat for reviewing! (ideally they would improve this by making a more freely formatted 'notes' pane that can be hyperlinked to the bookideally with audio support like onenote's)
- insert lined paper into a book (i.e. for doing math problems in a math textbook)
- the ability to very quickly pull up paper for rough work (i.e. win+N for onenote)
- something like zotero for unified management of pdf and html references (i.e not mendely)
The iPad fails as a student device as well. Apple could have cornered the student market by adding handwriting recognition to the iPad and offering a one stop device for reading books and taking notes. Instead there are rumours about adding a camera to the next gen iPad. What the hell is with the current trend of sticking a crappy camera in every freaking device?
The one thing I hate about purchasing textbooks is that the most expensive ones tend to be for the "basic" subjects like Biology, Chemistry, Calculus, etc. These are the ones that would benefit most from being open-sourced, as the information they contain is highly generic in comparison to, say, microprocessor fabrication, and would save a LOT of departments money and time. Of course, this won't happen anytime soon; how else will the authors make decent royalties?
Nonetheless, for practically all really popular textbooks in any subject, there's a PDF for that. I haven't paid for a textbook in at least two years.
That's pretty bad. If you had to prioritize one format to get right, pdf would be it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You picked a quote that is probably the most telling out in the article; Textbooks and reference materials are not read in a linear way. Where I work we publish reference books as well as more traditional books, and testing the reference books on a Kindle or any other eInk based unit is an agonizing exercise in "Next PageNext PageNext Page...." for minutes on end.
The eInk units are decent for reading stories or anything that doesn't require a bunch of navigation, but for stuff that does...
http://marsandmore.com - Posters of space, spacecraft, and astronomy.
Ebooks will win when an entire generation grows up on them. Like all things, using a digital device is only going to feel natural when you've been doing nothing but your entire life. It's part of why I like the whole leap-pad concept for kids. Yes, actual real-world 3D spatial skills development is important, but that's one of those things we get almost instinctually at birth - the first thing we do after screaming our heads off is reach for a nipple.
Have you ever used one?
As a grad student myself and a very prolific reader, I love my Kindle 6''. If I was still taking literature classes, instead of Library School classes, I would make heavy use of it for readings that don't involve secondary materials specific to editions. As it is I read the hell out of Gutenberg, Baen's Free Library, and books bought through http://webscriptions.net./
Granted, I couldn't have afforded to buy one myself; but if I had the money, I would have, and I probably would have bought specifically the Kindle, because the other readers available had a variety of hardware or pricing issues at the time I got mine.
As someone who's used one extensively, I'll say this - the Kindle isn't great for flipping back and forth in large works, which is a problem that needs to be solved. Being text searchable makes up for this somewhat, but the balance is moderately tipped toward paper textbooks.
On the other hand, for articles assigned that are available in full text (or, with the DX, PDF - the 6-inch Kindle isn't really suitable for most PDFs), the Kindle is amazing. Being able to take assigned articles on the train, or just to read them on my bed without having a laptop crushing my chest, is pretty great. The eyestrain benefits are also very significant, although to someone with less terrible eyes than me, it might be less so.
Unfortunately, in the U.S., that doesn't function because of copyright law and fair use limitations. Professors can copy things, but only if they're small portions of a work, and if they aren't going to be used in repeated classes, et cetera, et cetera.
I will say that, unless they're assigning their own book (or taking illegal kickback monies), professors generally don't profit from textbook sales. And even when using their own book, the royalties are so small for any individual purchase, that they're probably making a (insert dollars, pounds, 100 yen, etc) or so over an entire class, maximum.
I've always used indexes and explicit bookmarking much more extensively than I've really used browsing in this manner, personally; not that I haven't used this method, just that, when searching for specific materials, I would generally use these methods first.
Of course, as a Literature major, I read a LOT of unindexed works. And there, the Kindle does fall down.
One thing I've found really hard, actually, is to switch my thinking from pages to locations. It's just an arbitrary number, which is theoretically identical in function to page number, but I'm so used to the way pages work, I almost always forget to note position in eBooks.
Better than what's happening now: professor churns out a low-grade course book, then gets it added as a mandatory book. One of my calculus profs did that, and it was the worst piece of crap book I'd ever bought. There were mistakes in several formulas. Nearly every diagram was on a different page than the descriptive text (and by that, I mean a page-flip away. Then a page flip back to re-read the text, then a page flip again to see the diagram...)
And of course, he had already written the "second edition", so I couldn't even resell the junker.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Partial fix.
The problem isn't getting names attached, the problem is having those names be in the human reading the book's memory when he/she goes to look for the picture/graph.
Now, grant you, having an explicit description of each figure, and an index of figures with descriptions would be very useful. But it doesn't actually 100% solve the problem; it just substitutes a different competency for the missing one.
Note: previous post should have this text inserted: "Search utility capable of synonyms is a much harder problem than you may suspect. It's merely difficult at the word level (complicated by words with same-spelling/different meaning), but quickly spirals into deep magic territory on the phrase level.
Add this to the problem of subject description of pictorial material, and you've quickly gotten way ahead of what we're actually capable of, at least at the price-point and effort level attached to the average textbook."
Yes.
Not really - it's one of the small Kindles, so the screen is about the size of a page of a paperback book. It doesn't refresh fast enough to do proper scrolling, so that's out. The CPU is not nearly fast enough to do any sort of PDF re-pagination in a reasonable time, so it can't do that (and even then, re-paginating a PDF that's full of figures and charts is a non-trivial task, even if you run it through a real computer). It's basically screwed
Basically, the Kindle is useful for reading novels or other text-only things, but that's about it.
Yeah, any half-assed hack professor can write his own book. I ran into the same thing several times. I was really pleased when I got a class where the professor didn't actually write the textbook, but his research formed the basis for a chapter in someone else's book. He knew his stuff!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I understand and agree. Every day, literally every day, I'm thankful for the efforts of Andrew Carnegie, who funded about 3,000 libraries. Having a library began to be considered necessary for any self-respecting town.