In Trial, Kindles Disappointing University Users 247
Phurge writes "When Princeton announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. 'I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,' said Aaron Horvath, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. 'It's clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.' 'Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,' he explained. 'All these things have been lost, and if not lost they're too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the "features" have been rendered useless.'"
News? (Score:0, Insightful)
Early generation of new technology has drawbacks. News at 11.
People who write in textbooks... (Score:2, Insightful)
...are the scum of the earth. I can't stand that! Take separate notes! Respect the text for future users! And they always write stupid crap in'em, too.
Besides, they should've given'em to some real college students, like engineering majors. I'd love to stop carrying a pile 8 inches thick of textbooks around the campus every freakin' day. I mean, that can't be good for your back.
Actually reminds me of... (Score:2, Insightful)
I wouldn't replace my books with a Kindle (Score:4, Insightful)
I thoroughly enjoyed the time I've spent messing around with other people's kindles. I plan to buy one, but I just don't see them working for textbooks.
During my time in college, I never sold back one of my old textbooks, because I always "personalized" them so much during the semester by writing in, highlighting, and generally abusing all of them. Each and every one still sits on my bookcase, and I still reference them occasionally, as making them completely un-sell-back-able has made them exceptionally easy for me to use.
I think the student is right. You can't fly through a Kindle e-book the same way you can with a solid textbook. I suspect the Kindle is just made for more linear reading.
Solving the Interaction Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The quote in TFA sums up my objections to eBooks as replacements for texts fairly well. Bookmarks, dog-ears, margin notes and all the other ways we interact with books are more valuable than you might think at first. For example, I lent out one of my favorite cookbooks; for a while it looked like the borrower had lost the book. At first I didn't think this was too much of a tragedy as I could order another copy online cheaper than the original. Then it hit me, all of my notes, records, adjustments and comments were lost! All of the stains, broken spine and notes have a more value than I could put a dollar on. Without a way to incorporate that kind of interaction into an eBook, I fail to see how I could be coerced to switch to a reader.
I believe the technology exists to allow interaction at the level that I want, but no one has offered a reader that even comes close yet. It seems rather trivial to add a touch screen, or even a small tablet that allows hand-written sketches or notes to be added to the pages. The Kindle allows virtual dog-ears, but they're hard to search and you don't get the visual interaction of a real book. I can run my fingers over the edge of the book and quickly find the dog-ear that I left 1/3 of the way into the book.
What kinds of features would you like to see on an eBook to make it closer to a real book? What smart ideas do you have that would allow a user to interact, annotate and generally use a virtual book like a paper book? The most important on my list are margin notes, underlining, highlighting (and I mean highlight, not inverse text), sticky notes (I have no idea how this would work), and dog ears that are easily locatable.
When eBooks can offer a greater level of interaction than we have today, students will flock to them. Who wouldn't rather carry one Kindle over a chemistry, calculus and circuits book to class? I keep hoping the next reader will be the one, but we're just not there yet. Perhaps we never will be. Captain Picard still kept dead-tree books around even though he had those nifty tablet thingiees.
Re:novels. (Score:1, Insightful)
figures.. why do they insist on writing java apps for a slow embedded board? idiotic.
I prefer books over tech (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This isn't the only slow device... (Score:5, Insightful)
'... and if not lost they're too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the "features" have been rendered useless.' I feel like this with just about every portable device these days. Am I the only one?
That's about right. My iPhone is disastrous in that respect. Why? Because the developers put flashy graphics above UI speed. Any display change on an iPhone requires a brief rendered screen change effect - a sweep, or dissolve, or fly-away. The effect may only take a tenth of a second, but the device takes a full second or more to process it! Every button press, a pop-up graphic of the button. WHY???? There is more than enough processing power in all modern portable devices to handle all the operational functions of the device and to run the UI faster than any human could require. The temptation to use all that processing power to push the boundaries with chrome is rendering the devices even slower than previous generations of handheld technology, regardless of the improved hardware. Mobile developers: Back to basics, folks. Focus on what matters.
Re:I bought a Kindle in August (Score:3, Insightful)
Conserve paper? Conserve plastic! (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would anybody want to conserve paper? It's a very renewable resource. Tree/grass grows. Becomes paper. Paper rots as soon as book is no longer deemed useful.
If anything, we should be conserving plastic and chemicals. Those are NOT renewable. Mine limited fossil fuels. Make plastic. Plastic still exists hundreds of thousands of years after usefulness of the object has expired.
I'll take the real books, thanks!
Not "defective by design" (Score:3, Insightful)
Another college student with a kindle (Score:2, Insightful)
As a college student I don't really carry much sentimental value towards textbooks. I hate them because they're expensive and I would love for a cheaper replacement. Unfortunately the Kindle is not it.
I have a kindle and I love it for when I'm traveling and just reading a novel or a few articles but I tried using it as a textbook replacement and it was miserable. The difficulty of trying to multitask switching between pen and paper and scrolling pages with the kindle is too time consuming and frustrating.
If future e-readers and e-textbooks can integrate interactivity more effectively I might give them another try, but until then I'll take my chopped up trees please.
Re:I bought a Kindle in August (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Actually reminds me of... (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't matter whether it's true. The important thing in this anecdote is that it highlights the different thought processes concerning new technology, and doing that, it's believable enough to sustain itself decades after it's been proven false.
Western cultures have this tendency to automatically assume that new technology will be better, and spend money on it before realizing the obvious shortcomings. Here, it's the fact that books are not read-only, even if they have little extra storage capacity, and many students rely on that.
Re:Actually reminds me of... (Score:5, Insightful)
One more anecdote to reinforce my point: Once upon a time, I had a real programmer teaching me C. He did not let students pass who couldn't solve a small problem (like removing the next-to-last element of a singly-linked list) using only pen and paper. Every lecture, the first thing we did was to turn our computers off, and do one of these problems. Then he did the same at the blackboard.
Guess what: we learned more from that than the rest of the lectures and the books combined. If the basic learning process is missing, technology doesn't give it back.
bookmark a page in pdf document (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
You might think you're joking... but global take-up of this technology is never going to happen until the US does something about its byzantine copyright laws. Amazon is perfectly able to sell an international customer a paper copy of most books, but is usually unable (or unwilling) to sell him a digital version. Which is, I guess, why I have yet to see a Kindle here in Australia.
Furthermore, when US publishers somehow manage to claim copyright on the work of a British author long after he is dead and his work has passed into the public domain in his own country (I'm thinking of George Orwell here, from a recent
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:2, Insightful)
...are the scum of the earth. I can't stand that! Take separate notes! Respect the text for future users! And they always write stupid crap in'em, too.
I more or less agree with that, but only in the case when the book is not of your property (e.g., form a library). I almost never write in any of my dead tree books, however I can understand that sometimes it good to write some "afterthought" you got from reading a paragraph (which makes it easier to understand), that way, the next time you read it, you just have to glance at your previous writings.
Now, I like this snippet from the summary:
bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages â"
That is one of the reasons why I still print all the papers (I do research) I obtain.
There is no reader program (even in standard PC) that allows you to handle a document the way the dead-tree format allows you. For example, there's no way to "bookmark" a specific place in a PDF (there are "bookmark" fields, but they used for the "table of contents". Writing annotations is cumbersome and underlying is impossible unless you get a paid version (and is an awkward process).
So far, I have tested FoxitPDF viewer, adobe reader and these days I have started to use PDF-XChange [docu-track.com]
, this one I like because I can have several documents open in one window (tabbed-interface); this way I can have different PDF windows open with different research "themes".
Besides, they should've given'em to some real college students, like engineering majors. I'd love to stop carrying a pile 8 inches thick of textbooks around the campus every freakin' day. I mean, that can't be good for your back.
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't make myself clear. I don't mind people having e-readers without decent speech output. That's fine. What Amazon is doing that's evil is DRM-ing all the e-books, making it impossible for me to buy their products and listen to them with high quality speech synthesis.
Amazon is quickly tying up distribution rights, and leaving the blind/visually impaired in the lurch. We need to be able to translate electronic media into other forms: Braille, high speed speech, or even plain old huge fonts with magnifiers on a PC.
For some reason, people seemed to care about the disabled at one point, and provided wheel-chair access everywhere, at great expense to business. Why is there no outcry for the blind and visually impaired? If Amazon wins this, and they wind up as the only source for many books, many people will be hurt. Fuck them.
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:3, Insightful)
...are the scum of the earth. I can't stand that! Take separate notes! Respect the text for future users! And they always write stupid crap in'em, too.
That is stupid. A book is someone's private property, and his owner can do whatever he wants with it. There is no obligation to respect any future user since the owner, when obtaining a new or used copy of a textbook, never got into a contractual agreement to preserve it for someone else. Writing on a book has been a long standing and useful tradition.
What your self-centered mind dismiss, in a juvenile manner, what someone writes as stupid crap in'em, that actually made sense to someone else at some point. Not that you are impervious to writing something that might appear stupid to someone else, even you at some time in the future. Grow up dude.
Besides, they should've given'em to some real college students, like engineering majors.
Obligatory self-back-patting I see. At some point you'll transition from being a student into a professional, a real engineer. Don't feel you are all that just because you are an engineering major. Only when you graduate, with good grades, and when you demonstrate you can do the work, then you are entitled to feel good about it.
That is, instead of being dismissive of others, earn it.
I'd love to stop carrying a pile 8 inches thick of textbooks around the campus every freakin' day. I mean, that can't be good for your back.
Only if you don't know how to carry a backpack, or if you are extremely weak.
Jokes aside, I use a kindle to carry some textbooks and manuals I use at work. It does makes it very convenient, specially when I have to travel to do work. But the key difference is that I use these textbooks and manuals as reference material.
That is, I don't have them in the kindle for me to learn, but to quickly look for something that I know it's there, to verify if what I believe I know is applicable to the problem at hand. But not to learn.
Learning =/= using as reference. The ergonomics of the kindle are not there yet. Trust me on this one, you can't use one as a replacement for an actual, physical textbook, in the context of actually having to learn from it while trying to cross-reference whatever your instructor is dictating in the classroom.
technophilia (Score:2, Insightful)
we are so accustomed to the idea that throwing more technology at a problem solves it better, that sometimes we miss genuine real world situations where the technological solution to the problem has peaked, and further application of current technology makes things WORSE, not better
voting, for one: all voting should be done on paper ballot. electronic, or heck, even mechanical voting, is simply more expensive and results in more attack vectors for election night shenanigans. so you spend more money on more technology and you wind up with less faith in your democracy and your government
ebook readers like kindle: i'm sorry, but paperback, wood pulp, is pretty much the bomb when it comes to reading large texts. there are lots of edge conditions: low lighting, etc., where ebooks come out ahead, but when you throw in durability, batteries, price, etc., wood pulp comes out ahead overall in the positives and negatives
i'm sure there are more examples
something like the automobile is clearly better than the horse. something like the gun is clearly better than the bow and arrow. but there exists higher technological solutions to problems that are of less quality than lower tech solutions in this world, and our technophilia interferes with our ability to see that sometimes