In Trial, Kindles Disappointing University Users 247
Posted
by
kdawson
from the write-on dept.
from the write-on dept.
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.'"
A different opinion. (Score:5, Interesting)
Amen (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been saying this for years... it's just not the same. You really do *lose* something in electronic form, you just can't interact with the knowledge like you can with a good old fashioned book. I hope real books never go away!
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:5, Interesting)
People who write in textbooks are the scum of the earth. I can't stand that! Take separate notes! Respect the text for future users!
You have a choice when you get to the bookstore, you can pick the text that is brand new, the one that was obviously used by the guy that dropped out in the fifth week and is nearly pristine save for a few beer stains, you can pick the one that is loaded with all kinds of great notes, stickies and highlights of the most important stuff or something in between. It's your choice. I for one would rather stand on the toes of giants than try to reinvent the wheel.
Plastic Logic (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:4, Interesting)
The rest of us may choose to add to the scrawlings already written in our moldy piss-stained second editions when we're not consulting the handful of pirated PDF's and HTML help files.
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:5, Interesting)
By the same token though, I don't understand the obsession that some people seem to have with keeping their textbooks pristine...
Clean books are nice, but so are the memory aids provided by one's own notes/bookmarks/etc.
I admit, I don't like others' notes in my books, because they always seem completely wrong, and are merely distracting, not useful.
I think notes and marks (and bookmark, etc) in books are mostly useful as pointers into your existing mental representation of the text, and sort of as a way of physically representing the act of reading -- e.g., it's easier to ensure you fully read the text instead of zoning out and skimming bits, if you're "actively" involved with it. [The same is true of keeping external notes, but that's even more work; which one prefers seems down to individual taste.]
An e-reader with a well-done touch-pen interface that allowed actually writing in the margins, saving the notes externally, keeping multiple note layers, adding cross references, ... etc, might be even better than a physical book in some ways, but it doesn't sound like the kindle tech is up to it...
(the speed of things like page flipping is also an important issue -- I find I flip around much more often reading academic/technical material than e.g. fiction)
Linear Reading (Score:5, Interesting)
I've also read that the Kindle DX keyboard is next to useless.
Re:A different opinion. (Score:5, Interesting)
You're lucky: zero of my textbooks are available in electronic form. Additionally, I carried my Kindle around in my backpack for one day, in a case, and apparently a glass (?!) layer below the screen developed a crack, which Amazon refuses to place under the standard warranty.
When I did use mine, I often found it too slow at turning pages (not that I do it frequently, but it's nice to be able to quickly flip through pages to find the one you want). PDF reading was decent at best but often practically unusuable--and I have a DX. (It works best if you make your own PDFs and format them specifically to the screen dimensions.) Not that any of this matters now; now I have a $489 paperweight.
Note to future owners: get "accident" protection from SquareTrade or, if you must, Amazon itself. It will be worth it (although I'm not convinced I was rough at all with mine). Also, be sure to check availability if you plan to use it for any particular book; not everyone will be as lucky as the parent poster. Theoretically, the weight reduction would be nice; practically, you probably can't get every last book electronically, and you'll also have to deal with the fact that you're carrying a fragile sheet of glass in your bag instead.
Depends on your school (Score:3, Interesting)
A fair number of my professors photocopied the relevant sections from their own books and handed them out to the class. One mentioned that he made enough selling it elsewhere that he didn't need to burden his own students when we'd only need a few chapters from it.
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:News? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Kindle isn't working well? Good. Let it burn in Hell.
As a reader who is losing vision and the ability to read, the Kindle and US copyright bullshit seriously pisses me off. I no longer "read" books, but instead convert them to audio-books which I play at around 500 words per minute, using the totally awesome Eloquence TTS (the old ViaVoice speech synthesiser). I don't mind paying for the e-books, but Amazon and friends are leaving me high and dry. Their built-in voice in Kindle is completely useless, because it wont play fast and wouldn't be understandable even if it were, and it's not even enabled for many books. It's torture having to listen to it.
Fortunately, the Microsoft Reader format has been broken, with converlit [convertlit.com] program. I buy all my e-books from ebooks.com, and then convert them with some Linux utilities, and enjoy listening to them on my phone. However, I'm a big slashdot sort of geek, and this sort of hacking is natural for me. The vast majority of visually impaired individuals are stuck with no good solutions.
Every freaking building in the US that serves the public has to put a ramp to its door for the disabled. Why does Amazon get to slam the door in our face? FUCK AMAZON.
Re:Actually reminds me of... (Score:2, Interesting)
Well done, you've fallen for macho bull-shit. A common problem. Seems to work with women as much as men.
I disagree. Having to work and trace, by hand, the execution of a moderately large program and its state at every step is a very powerful tool. I had to do that a lot (combined with actual programming of course) during my first two years in CS. Best training I could get. Obviously as you progress into your junior year and the complexity of the problems grow, this is not a viable training method (here I would agree it would be macho bullshit to evaluate students with that method.)
But for freshmen/sophomore level CS students, certainly this is a good way to go. Get them to demonstrate how they can walk through an algorithm over a data structure by pen and pencil (as opposed to have them write cute little programs with colors and widgets that still print out the wrong result.)
It teaches you two things right of the bat - it teaches you how to debug (which is not the same as knowing how to use a debugger.) Also, it teaches you to see a program conceptually as a state machine, its state as a function of its prior state and the current step, and the next step as a state transition.
It teaches you a practical skill early on, one that you might not get at all until getting a few years of work experience.
Totally different experience (Score:4, Interesting)
I ordered one practically as soon as Amazon unveiled it, and I've been using it on pretty much a daily basis since July. I love it.
Is the navigation slow? Yes. Is the keyboard almost useless? Yes. Does it suck that they don't have folders in which to organize your documents? Yes.
On the other hand, the hundreds of pages of PDFs, articles, and book chapters I have to read for school are all stored in a single place. I can't stand reading stuff for any length of time on a computer screen; the Kindle's screen is much, much better. It also weights less than 2 lbs, which is much nicer to be carrying around in my bag all day in the city compared with my 5 lb laptop (small differences matter).
I found a torrent containing thousands of science fiction books and read several novels on the Kindle. I'm using Calibre, and I have it set so that each morning at 6:30 AM, my computer starts, Calibre fetches news from several sources and puts them on the Kindle, and the computer shuts off at 6:40. By the time I've made coffee, the Kindle is sitting there with the days news ready for me to read.
Obviously the built-in keyboard is pretty much useless, but I've always typed my notes separately anyway. Now, when I am done with my notes, I drop them in a watch directory on my home server; they are automatically converted to .MOBI format and put on a password protected website. Later, when I want them, I can just log into the site from the Kindle and download them directly to the home screen. This way I bypass Amazon's conversion service.
My experience with PDFs has also been great. I can only think of one file that hasn't rendered properly, out of several hundred. Occasionally if the original document is a larger format, the text will be small, but for most of my journal articles, etc., it is pretty much the perfect size.
It's definitely not perfect. I think it would be less useful for undergrads and more useful for grad students, who aren't going to be relying solely on commercial textbooks. It would be nice if you could take useful notes on the Kindle. It would be nice if it had a touchscreen like the iRex models. It would be nice if it had a lot of things. The question for me was, how long did I want to wait for all those features to become widely available? I am getting so much use out of the DX just as a reader that it has made it worth it for me.
NASA Tried this from 1994-1997 (Score:5, Interesting)
NASA tried to replace the books used in the mission control centers world-wide with electronic versions. The electronic version had methods to do everything you'd do with a paper book, except "feel" it. We had sticky notes, authors, readers, layers, callouts for running programs, shared views, remote control, text search across entire libraries, and heuristics to teach new flight controllers by watching older flight controllers work problems. And we were FAST, cross platform data, multi-language. After a few years of forced acceptance - no paper allowed - users slowly returned to paper.
This program was used by NASA flight controllers, engineers and astronauts world-wide. That includes Russians, French, Canadian and other space agencies.
It ran on Win32, Mac, DigitalUnix, Solaris, AIX, Irix, and perhaps others. I can't recall porting it to any other platforms. That was my job at the time, ports. The total project cost under $4M over 3 yrs. We were cheap and produced results. We taught Adobe some things too, but learned much from them.
Regardless, it failed because humans like paper books, not for any technical reason.
Re:I HATE HATE HATE VISTA!! (Score:2, Interesting)
SIW is a more complete info list, complete with every little piece of hardware/software on the machine. If it is in the machine SIW will find it and list it, as well as dump it to HTML or text. And since like Belarc it is 100% free why not use the more complete?
And OT, but don't you love how bad moderation is on /. now? You'd think phrases like being punished for a past life or exorcising the demon Vista they would have gotten the joke. I guess for funny posts we will have to put.....this is a funny post....at the top of it so mods will actually understand. That or actually come up with sarcasm and funny tags for the funky HTML used here.