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.