Ivy League students: Kindle DX a 'poor excuse of an academic tool'
Summary: One of the original colleges and universities selected for Amazon's educational pilot program for the Kindle DX e-book reader is Princeton University, and now that the school's students have had some time with the device, well, they hate it.
One of the original colleges and universities selected for Amazon's educational pilot program for the Kindle DX e-book reader is Princeton University, and now that the school's students have had some time with the device, well, they hate it.
The Daily Princetonian reports that its Generation Y students are "dissatisfied and uncomfortable" with the Kindle DX, with one student going so far as to call it "a poor excuse of an academic tool," adding that the DX is "clunky, slow and a real pain to operate."
The main criticism of the device is the Kindle's poor annotation features -- the kind of features that replace highlighting and margin notes possible on a digital device. (Example: a lack of true page numbers -- the Kindle uses "location numbers" -- leaving students who want to cite references properly lost.)
The DP reports that rumor 'round campus is that Princeton won't be bringing the Kindle back to school next year -- but there's plenty of time for Amazon to make good.
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Talkback
Ain't no substitute ...
Yet...
But this also demonstrates the liability of a closed architecture. If this were an open platform (not necessarily F/OSS, but at least one that allowed for modifications to the software) you can bet there would be countless developers working on improvements to the interface as we speak, all racing to be the first to market.
Countless developers maybe ...
RE: Ivy League students: Kindle DX a 'poor excuse of an academic tool'
I love reading books on it, my biggest pet peeve is that I
can't find certain page numbers and flipping backward to
find a reference is a giant pain in the butt. This became
especially apparent when I downloaded a bunch of travel
guides to it for my European vacation this summer. I
bought the thing so I could avoid the bulk of carrying all
those books, but whenever I had to flip back it was 10
minutes of searching pages. It helped a little when I got
the bookmark thing down, but not that much and the
search feature wasn't a great help either as if I was
searching for something in a certain city it brought up
everything in that city.
Don't get me wrong I love my Kindle, but I can't imagine
using it instead of books. Although if school books get
anymore expensive I might have to rethink that statement.
RE: Ivy League students: Kindle DX a 'poor excuse of an academic tool'
Sony cannot compete in the long run ...
RE: Ivy League students: Kindle DX a 'poor excuse of an academic tool'
Amazon is a big player in the field - and the first with a sizeable user base and distribution channel. There is a lot going for the Kindle for the avid reader but 'mark up' is a big deal in an academic environment and there needs to be a workable solution.
My guess us that the DX 2 will address these concerns.
Unlike the other vendors in the e-reader segmet of the market, Amazon possesses the clout to get the attention of academic publishers. If the Kindle DX can address its shortcomings, we could see this segment explode.