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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
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
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!
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
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.
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?"
and I have awful vision.
Perhaps there's a reason for that.
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
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.
So they settled for user reports written in Powerpoint?
I don't think it is any better. in fact I think Crayon is a much better tool for reports than powerpoint.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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
Depends on what you're reading. Many textbooks are formatted for paper that is not much smaller than 8 1/2 x 11. Grabbing a not atypically sized one (Dummit & Foote's Abstract Algebra) gives pages that are about 7.5x9.25 in, or about 12" in diagonal. Displaying that on a 10.1" screen gives almost a 15% reduction in magnification.
For a more extreme example, take a typical CS conference paper. Printed on 8.5x11 paper (13.9" diagonal) in 10 or 11 pt font, two column format, reducing that to the size of 10.1" gives a 27% reduction in size. That 11 point font is now barely 8 points; if it's 10pt, then it now acts like 7.2pt. At LCD resolutions, that's starting to really impact readability IMO.
Now sure, you can scroll and such, but this can be a huge PITA. It's a PITA if you're using a textbook with figures that you want to refer to; it's a PITA if you're reading something formatted in 2-column format because you have to scroll way more, etc.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
They didn't scrap it, they never had a project in the first place. It was just a mockup to deny apple some mindshare.
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.