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.'"
Why? (Score:2, Funny)
Were they uncomfortable and dissatisfied when their assignments vanished shortly before their due dates?
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Actually reminds me of... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Actually reminds me of... (Score:5, Informative)
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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
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.
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I barely touched a computer getting my CS degree. Most of my assignments were handed in as code (in the specified language) hand-written on paper in pencil.
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But did you have someone experienced show you his own thought process immediately afterwards? That was the valuable part of the lecture.
I'll get off your lawn now.
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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
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The problem with my school's CS program is that they continued to require writing proper syntax code throughout all 4 years, rather than simply learning how to step through a process in pseudo-code. So instead of reinforcing proper visualisation of a program's execution, we got penalized for not remembering the exact name of a C++ library function.
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Russian Scientists Announce Six-Month Delay In Carving New Space Station [theonion.com]
Re:Actually reminds me of... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh come on, everyone knows the hand scrawled notes in the margins is where you find the most interesting spells.
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:4, Funny)
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"This ereader is the property of the Half Blood Prince". Nah, it just doesn't sound as good.
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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.
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
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I agree. The best students I know don't even buy the books, let alone write in them, because they're actually using the material in practice (hobby, job, overkilling lab work, etc.) and internalise it better than note-taking and highlighting ever could. They look lazy until you see what they can actually do.
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:5, Funny)
If medical students practice at home, we call it "phychopathic serial killer". Not all (or in fact; most) studies can't really be practiced as a hobby.
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)
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But if you have reiterated the process, you are well prepared to invent Wheel 2.0.
CC.
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Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:5, Funny)
I agree. Harry Potter could never have made that potion on his first try if he had taken a new textbook!
Re:People who write in textbooks... (Score:5, Funny)
Toes ?
Scared of heights are you ?
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my experience with used textbooks is that if the previous owner was a highlighter, they'd mark entire paragraphs, and sometimes entire sections. Maybe that works for some people (I kind of doubt it though) but I find it distracting.
When I purchased used books I took care to buy the book with the least amount of markings. If the only copies available were covered in highlighter yellow, I'd suck it up and pay the premium for the new book.
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Seriously, nothing pisses me off more than reading a textbook that someone wrote in / highlighted in. It's rather distracting from trying to actually read what's in the book.
The comment about cutting down on weight for real majors is pretty spot on too.......I'd love to have had some wimpy English major or some such where I didn't have colossal books to lug around all the time.
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I disagree... (Score:2)
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...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 re
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...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 poi
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.
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That said I think I would need 3 or 4 kindles easily for this to work out for me. I like looking at lots of things at once spread out over my desk. I also often stick a pencil in the reference section in the back so I can flip to it quickly. I think I could probably handle a half dozen kindle at once really. And I don't have 3 grand to drop on something that doesn't give me much of an advant
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Like that fool Fermat who posited a solution to a problem that occupied mathematicians for hundreds of years.
If you don't like the notes stop buying used text books.
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in high school?
If you so disdain the learning process perhaps you should pursue a trade instead?
Besides, sometimes you can get enough money from a $100 text to buy a case of natie light.
I bought a Kindle in August (Score:5, Informative)
I sent it back in September.
The navigation was atrocious and slow, the books I would read cost more in electronic form than in paper form and had much more severe licensing than the paper form. Translating PDF media to Kindle form resulted in something much less readable than on a laptop. The web browser was pathetic. The display wasn't as high contrast as a 40 yr old paperback. The keyboard letter labels are too small.
The darn thing was way too expensive for what it was.
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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.
Re:Totally different experience (Score:4, Informative)
I'm certainly not concerned about the torrented books. Also, to clear up a misconception, Amazon can't simply remove anything from your Kindle without action on your part. You first have to turn on the wireless (which is kept off to save battery life), and then (I believe) manually select "Sync and Check for New Items." That's the way you get new purchases, and the way they can remove purchases.
I posted about this elsewhere, but I bought a Kindle book and got a refund because the quality was poor (apparently Amazon OCRs some books in-house). Out of curiosity, I synced my Kindle after getting the refund, and the book disappeared. However, when I restored a backup copy, not only was I able to read it, but the book has not disappeared despite syncing several times after that.
My suspicion is that anyone with the 1984 book would likely have been able to restore a backup and use it without issue.
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I use mine for reading novels, and have saved about $1.50 per book, on average, with the Kindle.
If you found a book which was more expensive on the Kindle, that's probably an anomaly.
A different opinion. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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My freshman year I bought every textbook and hauled them all around. Then I came to realize that in most classes I didn't actually need the book in class, so I started leaving it in my car or at home. By my senior year I only bought two books for nine classes. I found that in most classes (all but math) that simply going to class, taking good notes, and studying the material with my study group was enough for me to learn it, the book was just dead weight.
novels. (Score:3, Informative)
I have one. It's great for novels. I've read ten sci-fi novels on it so far. Reading from the first page to the last is no problem, and having features like instant dictionary look-up is wonderful. But I'm not sure they would be so good for text books, where you're flipping back and forth a lot. To navigate any more than forward/back, you need to use a cumbersome, slow joystick thingy.
Perhaps future Kindles with touch-screens would be good enough. The search feature would be pretty useful for academic purposes compared to dead-tree. But he's right: having to use that joystick to navigate in "random" directions (rather than next/previous page) is a pain.
(oh and a bonus for the slashdot crowd: the Kindle is just Linux running some java reader app. you can actually install a full blown Ubuntu system via the USB port if you like.)
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.
But perhaps great for books with problem sets... (Score:2)
I'm not sure about the rest of the group, but my college math books would have been great candidates for digitization. In all of my math courses:
I relied on the professor to teach. The books themselves were fairly useless -- the examples were always too simple and the explanations usually had a lot of hand-waving. In any case, I generally left the books on the shelf until homework time, when they came out so that I could copy and evaluate the problem sets for
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I had the exact opposite experience...My textbooks were my bible. I found that if I needed to reference something, I could usually open the book and land on the right page within a few seconds of grabbing it off the shelf.
I suppose you just had useful textbooks. How novel...
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I shared the same experience with the same math classes.
After being taught Fourier transforms for the third time, I finally understood them in a dynamic systems course.
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I'd agree. I like my Kindle, in addition to novels, its great for weekly magazines that are mostly text as well (The Economist and Newsweek for me). However, it'll take a lot more to take over my physical textbooks.
Still, what would be nice is if I could pay an extra ~$10 for kindle or PDF versions -- while they can't replace a good physical copy, I like being able to have most of the things I need to do work in one bag. Since I move between home/office/coffee shops/out-of-town travel I have a bad habit
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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.
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" ... What kinds of features would you like to see on an eBook to make it closer to a real book? ..."
Well, mostly, I want it to be made of paper.
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!
I prefer books over tech (Score:4, Insightful)
Plastic Logic (Score:2, Interesting)
I like my Kindle (Score:2)
I'm not surprised that it is not that great for student text books. But, guess what! It does not have to solve all problems for all readers to be successful.
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The best thing about the Kindle is the portability. The last time I went on vacation I packed 4 books, and that was all I could fit in. Next vacation, I can take a dozen (or more) books on a device about the size of ONE hardback book.
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!
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A significant % of paper is produced using pulp from old growth forests. Even when farmed forests are used, the types of rapid growth trees used are often vastly different than the native ecosystem of the environments in which they are planted.
The mantra for ecologically friendly use of resources is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". It's always better to use less of a resource then more.
That said, I have not performed any analysis on the equivalent paper footprint to one Kindle. I suspect it is greater than 2 dozen
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Plastic still exists hundreds of thousands of years after usefulness of the object has expired.
Last I checked, every single example of 100,000-year-old plastic that was no longer useful had long since been dug up out of its landfill and recycled.
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Same reason cotton and wool are not considered "green" products but hemp is.
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Doesn't paper also sequester carbon (assuming the book doesn't get thrown away)? One thing it doesn't do is allow deletion of content remotely (except nuking from orbit, of course), prevention of lending to other people, etc.
Not "defective by design" (Score:3, Insightful)
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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 f
Value extracted from cost? (Score:2)
Linear Reading (Score:5, Interesting)
I've also read that the Kindle DX keyboard is next to useless.
I am probably alone. (Score:2)
I've never written in a textbook, or any other book for that matter, whether I own it or not. I've never intentionally torn any pages. Instead, I've always tried, sometimes rather hard, to understand the text and the concepts behind it -- and then I move on.
Have I spent my entire life doing it wrong?
(Or, perhaps alternatively: Am a prime candidate for getting real use from a Kindle?)
iRex iLiad (Score:5, Informative)
I am an Australian, and as such Kindles are not viable for me, as they are not sold to Australian residents, and even if you get your hands on one, buying books is hard. Instead I purchased the only eBook reader officially sold in Australia - to my knowledge - the iRex iLiad.
I am loving it.
While it is not as high contrast as book paper, it is close. It is very readable, even for hours on end.
Navigating is made a lot easier by the stylus driven touch screen, though it is hampered slightly by the slow page/screen refresh. I find it more than livable though. It would be a lot worse without the stylus.
Once your in a book it is perfect, because you can change pages with the flick of a thumb. It is much better than holding a weighty book, and having to shuffle your arms around every minute or so to change pages.
One of the coolest features relevant to this article is the ability to scribble over books. With the stylus you can write on top of books, and your notes will be saved in a file associate with the book. It also has a highlight feature.
I must say though that I do not use it for academic research. Mostly personal research, and recreational reading. I personally think it would be fine for academia, but I don't have much experience in that field, so I can't really comment.
My only real complaint is the lack of books. The range is terrible, and the prices only 2% to 5% cheaper than normal books. As such I am getting to know and love the many public domain books. A great site I have found for this is: http://manybooks.net/
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A pity the device itself is EUR 600. You can buy quite a few dead-tree books for that kind of cash.
bookmark a page in pdf document (Score:2, Insightful)
Dear Amazon, (Score:4, Funny)
Best Wishes,
P. de Fermat
Not a panacea (Score:2)
I've just got myself a Sony e-book and while I like it it has limitations when compared to books.
Its great for books with a narrative such as novels, but for text books reference books it major limitations is the navigation. With these types of books I want to flip backwards and forwards across multiple pages. Find Index, locate Subject etc. You cannot do that easily with a e-book so locating information even with search tools becomes a pain.
Apparatus for paper-like user interaction (Score:2)
That sounds like patent fodder to me!
"Apparatus and user-interaction method for paper-like electronic book interaction". An apparatus and input method for allowing the user of an electronic book reader device to interact with reading material in a way similar to that used with paper-based books.
What is claimed is:
1. An apparatus for reading electronic book texts
2. The apparatus from claim 1 in which often-used pages get discolorations around the edges and borders.
3. The apparatus from claim 2 in which the d
iRex iLiad (Score:2)
Why are all these fools using Amazon's locked-in crappy reader? A Kindle simply isn't suitable for professional work, or even students. iRex iLiad is still the only ereader with *correct* pdf rendering and mark up.
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A Kindle simply isn't suitable for professional work, or even students. iRex iLiad is still the only ereader with *correct* pdf rendering and mark up.
I think you mean the Kindle isn't suitable for you. Why do you generalize from your experience to all people?
I looked at iRex's offerings before deciding to get a Kindle DX. iRex's definite strength is the Wacom pen input. If that's a necessity for you, then they are pretty much your only option. Not all of us need to write all over everything we read, though.
iRex's products are also expensive! $699 for the iLiad, which has a smaller screen than the DX and isn't in stock, and $859 for the DR-1000... ouch. T
Lessons learned from the XO-1 (Score:2)
When you take technology out into the cold, hard world, things fall apart. If you want to even come close to the experience of using a book, look to the XO-1 [wikipedia.org] for some lessons in utility and hardiness:
Way too fragile (Score:2)
I would estimate the half-life of a Kindle subjected to the usual slings and arrows of class-to-class migration at 4 weeks. They don't talk about durability in the article, but I know from (tragic) first-hand experience that those e-Ink displays make 1990s LCDs look tough.
A Kindle is good as a travel reader of linear texts. For anything else, the contrast, fragility and slow speed make it highly inferior.
The Kindle is NOT a note taking device. (Score:2)
I've had my kindle 2 reset mysteriously on me.
All the docs I'd downloaded over USB were gone, along with the notes I'd taken on them. They were the majority of what I had on the device, largely PDFs I'd converted to mobi format using Calibre on Linux. The docs I'd gotten over WhisperNet were archived and I was able to get them back. So if I'd indeed been using it to take notes I really needed later, I'd have been screwed.
Lesson 1: Back up your Kindle, or totally embrace Amazon's version of the cloud in w
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: (Score:2)
Which iPhone do you have? Supposedly the 3GS is a little snappier, but I have an original 1st gen iPhone and I've never noticed any kind of annoying delay. Are you talking about app loading times?
Re:News? (Score:4, Funny)
But the DRM in it is state-of-art!
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: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.
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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: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously. It has gotten to the point that I don't want to buy used textbooks online because the stores misrepresent the level of graffiti in them.
Plenty of students prefer used textbooks that are all marked up with highlighter and notes because they just use them to study to avoid having to go to the effort to find the best passages. This is how you can coast through college with a 3.0 GPA with very little effort.