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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."
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
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
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
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__()
the Sony Daily Edition perfectly fits the bill.
It sounds like it would be great, if anybody but Sony made it. Sorry, but after they rooted my PC there's no way I'll buy anything with a Sony logo, ESPECIALLY computer gear. A company that would put rootkits on legitimately purchased music CDs would stoop to anything.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
True, that said it could have an amazing future in academia if they just come up with something good enough. I have hundreds of papers lying around, keep reprinting stuff I can't find, have plenty of notes on some and taking them with me when traveling is a pain. Honestly I am dying to have a nice device where I can easily read my scientific papers, tag them with keywords and bibliographic info for easy searches, add notes and what not.
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.
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
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 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
> How on Earth do you know it's all in their head?
Because that's where their eyes are.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I dunno. $498 still seems insanely high. I can get a netbook for $199, or a really nice laptop for $450.
http://www.techdealdigger.com/pr/cheap-acer-aspire-one-aod250-1151-101-inch-black-netbook-deals/3391
http://www.dealhack.com/archives/2010/05/133_hp_pavilion_dm3_ultrathin.html
In many ways netbooks and notebooks are superior for reading ebooks, especially ebooks in PDF format. Of course, netbooks and notebooks do far more than just read ebooks.
BTW: the $99 readers use e-Paper, which seems like it might be e-Ink by another name.
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.