"Falls flat" or "some people said they didn't like it a lot"?
I would have loved the Kindle when I was in school. I remember carrying around 5 different textbooks all day, and that was not particularly fun -- especially since we didn't really ever use the whole textbook. (The $100 spent for each just added insult to injury...)
One thing I liked about textbooks was the ability to doodle in them while in class. It was a good way to pass the time in boring lectures, and is not easily replicated on the Kindle.
> especially since we didn't really ever use the whole textbook.
I saw some people at my university chopping the big textbooks up in sections and putting each in a binder. Worked wonders for the weight, but I'm not sure what it did to resale value.
> "Falls flat" or "some people said they didn't like it a lot"?
It looks like the professors of the courses are included in the “some people”. Presumably they got feedback from their students.
> I remember carrying around 5 different textbooks all day,
In college, you carried all your textbooks around? Why? It’s not like they’re needed during lecture, and you can’t use more than a couple of them at once, etc.
-----
Anyway, the courses where the kindle was tried look like ones with 200-300 pages of reading a week of little articles (like most humanities/social science courses), where if they didn’t use the kindle, students would be doing the reading on printed pdfs (more than a few years ago, these would be Xeroxes, etc.). I really can’t imagine the current ebook readers being better than paper for this sort of reading, given how awful they are for underlining, taking marginal notes, etc.
This seems like a better model for the iPad. The kind of heavy note taking interaction means they were looking more for a PDA-ish replacement.
The Kindle is very much optimized for reading, taking some notes is definitely possible, but the quality of the interaction has been traded off with issues like battery life and cost.
The iPad however has traded a lot of battery life for a much richer interaction model which might make a lot more sense in this context.
I think this was a biased study -- they were used in upper-level politics classes in the Woody Woo school, which require lots of discussion about the reading itself (1300+ printed pages). Using kindles for paper-saving purposes misses the point of the device [they can save paper by having people print double-sided (or 4 pages per side) and handing out magnifying glasses ;)].
If the kindles were used for PDFs for math/engineering/cs classes, I think there'd be much better reception. You'd save the trouble of lugging around giant books, where the focus is less on the book as a source, and more on examples/understanding the material. You can't exactly plow through math papers so it's ok to have one page flip every 5 minutes. Also, PDFs are rendered page by page so you can easily jump to a certain one if needed.
I have a kindle and ebook readers are definitely not for detailed, interactive experiences. The main convenience is having dozens of books on hand that you can read or reference (but not mark up) easily.
Re: "If the kindles were used for PDFs for math/engineering/cs classes, I think there'd be much better reception."
Absolutely not. I have a K1, K2, iPhone Kindle, and read about 200-300 pages/week on them. They are great for fiction, long reading, essay reading but are absolute fails when it comes to Mathematics, technical texts, diagrams, or anything with colored illustrations.
And, don't underestimate the amount of rapid random flipping you do in a mathematics text book - bouncing around pulling up forms for integration by parts, trying to track down lemma's for proofs, etc... The kindle is _useless_ for rapid random page flipping - sequential or footnote read-n-back only (The footnote navigation is actually pretty good).
Finally - PDFs on a kindle are converted into free form text (poorly, particularly with diagrams - a page which can normally handle about 5 diagrams on paper, can only handle 2 on a kindle) - you lose the page by page rendering, except in those rare cases where you pull them over as page-images, and trust me - fast way to bring your Kindle (K1/K2) to a screeching halt - also unreadable.
I have high hopes for the iPad in this space, but time will tell. I'll be waiting in line though when it comes out.
I used to have a K2, but upgraded to a DX (or rather was gifted one). It's just barely big enough to read Academic two-column papers without making your eyes bleed, and the native PDF support works great, which is fantastic.
But regardless, the thing is still useless in a live classroom discussion environment where you need to page faster than 0.2 pages per second.
This pilot answered the question: “are kindles good devices for reading-intensive social science courses”. The answer is clearly “no, or at least, not yet”.
The issue is mainly with the software. An open source platform would allow the university to tailor the software of the device to the needs of the classroom for which is was not originally designed. Also, the keyboard was prohibitively small, which would suggest that maybe the solution is laptops which are probably already owned by most students and are open platforms for software development.
There’s no way each university is going to write the whole software stack for an ebook reader. Given current hardware and software, laptops are a poor substitute for hard copies of all the reading (at least in my experience). Making software that’s useful enough to replace printed pages is going to take decent-sized teams years of development effort.
Inkseine is a research project that has been in progress for years, not a shipping product. A few months? Are you joking?
This paper about it from 2007 has seven authors, guys who have spent their careers on similar technology. I can’t tell if it’s down to just one guy by now. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1240666
> The inability to quickly navigate between documents and view two or more documents at the same time also frustrated users.
On my eBook reader (not a Kindle, btw) the bookmarking is also woefully inadequate. Only six bookmarks in total, and no way to see to which document they link, or when that document was last accessed.
This is definately an area to improve eBook reading software.
In order to thrive a device is going to need a stylus for highlighting and ideally the ability to recognize handwriting, if not then at least it needs to be able to save handwritten notes. Things will get far more interesting with tech that enables student collaboration.
1. Power consumption. I already have numerous other gadgets needing power. Having yet another device that needs power to work means setting up yet another place for it to charge. Granted, books need more storage space, so this is balanced.
2. Very limiting. I have numerous technology books, and often I'm flipping back and forth between two or three. I don't see being able to do this with a single device.
3. It's a single purpose device. I already have too many devices alread (iPod and Phone), and I find that too much still. Couple that ear phones, keys, and a wallet, it's far too much stuff I need to carry around. An e-book reader would be just one more thing I'd need to carry around.
4. Lending capabilities is non-existent. Unless the person also has an e-book reader (and here I'm making the assumption that I can even lend the book from device to device), they can't be lent the book. I've done this enough that it's actually rather important.
5. Going beyond the lending problem, I'm not alone, and my family might want to read something as well. Current e-book readers mean needing one for every person. Throw DRM concerns on top of that, and I don't know how it could be handled. If I want to read one book, and my wife another book, and we have only one e-book reader...
6. Cost. While an individual device isn't that expensive, you still have to buy a lot of books to make up for the difference in price. Even if you read a lot like me, not all my reading is done with books. I'm a big Audible fan, so this cuts into my time as well. But still, the device is expensive, usability is still awkward.
Side note: I've tried out Sony's e-book readers, and maybe it's just the floor models, but they seem awful, cumbersome, and something I would expect to see as an early alpha. Buttons are slow to react, touch-screen is finicky, and whats with the ugly flashing black screen every time it changes pages? God help me if I want to scroll to a certain page. End note.
Obviously both MS and Apple, amongst other manufacturers, see the potential with the tablet like devices. The magic device will solve the 'hard to read for long periods' problem, as well as the cost problem. Oddly enough, I constantly think of Star Trek and their pads they carry around. They have a lot of them, and treat them rather roughly. That's the direction I think people need to take, using those 'data pads' as a reference for how they could be used.
For some reason, I think Microsoft will get there first.
I was surprised by their common complaint that the Kindle doesn't have page numbers! What were they thinking to leave out that feature?! It cripples the usefulness of the device for heavy reading over longer time spans.
They don't have page numbers per se, but they do have page ranges. Because you can change the text size, actual page numbers themselves completely change. The numbering system that the Kindle uses is based, from what I can tell, on words/sentences/paragraphs. It took me ages to figure out that "1237-48" meant "From 1237 to 1248" and not something like "1237.48". It's horribly communicated, but it makes sense when you figure it out.
I would have loved the Kindle when I was in school. I remember carrying around 5 different textbooks all day, and that was not particularly fun -- especially since we didn't really ever use the whole textbook. (The $100 spent for each just added insult to injury...)
One thing I liked about textbooks was the ability to doodle in them while in class. It was a good way to pass the time in boring lectures, and is not easily replicated on the Kindle.