Kindle fails college test as textbook replacement

[thewayne]

Surprise factor: zero. The students can't highlight, can't easily flip between pages, complain that the bookmarking function is buggy, color charts are less valuable (Kindle is monochrome), and that the cost of ebooks is not significantly cheaper than dead tree editions. In fact, the article quotes that one ebook costs as much as a used copy of the text.

I think the best comment is from months ago when they first started the pilot program, that when working on papers, it's good to have multiple different books open to multiple passages as you're composing your thoughts. You just can't do that with a Kindle.

They're saying that the iPad will be used in similar trials in the near future, and I'll bet it will have similar problems. One complaint that I have about my iPod Touch is that it's not easy to select a single row of text, or multiple words, for copy/cut/paste functions. Maybe it's easier on a full-sized iPad, but it's not easy at iPod sizes.

Amazon's executive is, of course, saying that the 'pilot program is providing a lot of valuable feedback.'

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2011938870_kindle24.html

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/05/25/1713242/Amazon-Kindle-Fails-First-College-Test?art_pos=18

Comments

[anyeone.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I realized pretty quickly that I didn't like using the kindle for technical manuals. I love it for reading though.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I think fundamentally most ebook readers are wonderful devices. I would be ecstatic if I could get all of my books in an open format on my laptop, but the publishers and Amazon want too much control and are not going to let that happen.

So make mine a dead tree edition.

[silveradept]

Yeah, e-book research need multiple browser windows, really, just to be able to move back and forth between the things you want to synthesize. I'm not surprised, either.

Of course, I might be a bit biased, because I know full well that libraries and their books will not pass into oblivion just because of shiny new things.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

"...libraries and their books will not pass into oblivion..."

Heck, if there's one thing that television's taught us, it's that libraries will survive a nuclear holocaust. Unfortunately you'll then step on your glasses...

[silveradept]

And curse needing to find a new pair in your prescription. Thankfully, there's a whole blighted world to explore to do it with...

[donkey-hokey.livejournal.com]

I love my Kindle. But I realize that everything on it is ephemeral. Tech manuals are much more useful (in many ways) in paper. If nothing else, the places I use tech manuals are often not the same places I would feel comfortable using my Kindle.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Amazon proved the ephemeral nature of the Kindle a few months after it came out and yanked copies of 1984 and Animal Farm that Amazon, in good faith, bought from someone who didn't have the rights to sell it to them. So they used their WhisperNet cell connection to yank them.

One of the people with 1984 was a high school senior who was an advanced placement student working on a college admission paper who had extensively annotated his copy. All the annotations were irretrievably lost.

I've never paid for an ebook, 100% of my material comes from free sources such as Project Gutenberg. I use electronic books all the time for reference on my laptop, I'm particularly fond of O'Reilly's Perl library which consists of six books on Perl in HTML format. Unfortunately I've heard that the newer editions went to PDF and are much less friendly to use, though I don't remember the specific objections.

On a single screen computer, I definitely prefer having a hard copy of the book that I'm referring to. But multiple monitors is a beautiful thing....