Lukewarm Kindle reception
Apparently the trial at Princeton isn’t working out too well (via Slashdot)
“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”
Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.
“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.”
Um, I hate to sound like a jerk, but he does sound like a luddite. He can do all of those things with Kindle, with the exception of, perhaps, ripping out pages.
I admit Kindle is horrible for scientific reading. Too little scientific texts are available in Kindle format, and conversion from PDF to Kindle format (or rather, the popular Mobipocket format, which is what essentially .azw files are) doesn’t work well for mathematical equations.
But, for reading materials consisting mostly of English-language (Kindle has issues with some Unicode fonts as well) text, meant to be read from start to finish without too much jumping around, Kindle works fine. In fact, it works better than physical books, because you can annotate without the fear of having to erase the marks later or running out of margin space. If the guy couldn’t figure out how to do this, frankly, does he really belong in a university?
In fact, this trial may be dominated by a single person who, for one reason or another, seems to be biased against Kindle: Prof. Katz. All the students who complain are from his class, and he is the only professor quoted as critical of the device. And his criticism? All of his own making, i.e. Kindle won’t be available next year so I don’t want to annotate with it (or transfer his old annotations; that shouldn’t be a problem for his student now, should it), or Kindle book isn’t an “analog book”, so it doesn’t use the same pagination.
I’ll gloss over the fact that books are actually more “digital” than “analog”—if it were analog, you would have what’s called “signal degradation”, you don’t have that with written texts—and as for the pagination problem, you have the exact same problem using two different versions of the same text (perhaps different editions by different publishers). It’s hardly a problem unique to Kindle, and besides, classic texts should have their own chapter and line number system which should keep them independent of arbitrary pagination, as far as citations go.
To be completely frank, I don’t see the point of universities subsidizing Kindle devices (Amazon donating them to the founder’s alma mater is a different matter, of course), no more than I see the point of universities subsidizing the students’ laptops. I do think anyone considering getting an ebook reader, i.e. Kindle or any of its competitors, should consider whether the rather hefty price ($200+, more than what you would pay for a basic netbook) is really worth it.
For me, it wasn’t really just the size of the device or its screen that made me buy Kindle (although I did love them after seeing them). It was the free wireless and Wikipedia access. But somehow, in an academic class setting, unless some course really heavily relies on accessing Wikipedia out in the field without wifi or wired Internet access, I don’t see the advantage of Kindle over, say, a good, cheap netbook—unless, of course, the person buying Kindle considers its e-ink screen worth the lack of some functionalities.