We've
never thought the
Kindle DX was ideal for serious studying, and it sounds like the students and teachers in
Princeton's pilot program agree with us -- after two weeks of use in three classes, the Daily Princetonian reports many are "dissatisfied and uncomfortable" with their e-readers, with one student calling it "a poor excuse of an academic tool." Most of the criticisms center around the Kindle's weak annotation features, which make things like highlighting and margin notes almost impossible to use, but even a simple thing like the lack of true page numbers has caused problems, since allowing students to cite the Kindle's location numbers in their papers is "meaningless for anyone working from analog books." That's all led to word that Princeton won't be bringing the Kindle back to school next year, but we'll see if Amazon -- or
anyone else -- can address all these complaints before that decision is made final.
[Thanks, Tom]
posted Sep 28th 2009 1:44PM
AHAHAAHAH!!!!!!!!!
nuf said.
peepee hed
Uh......itz got dat copy/paste?
"a poor excuse of an academic tool."
I don't think the Kindle is to blame for this poor kid's lack of an understanding of prepositions.
Kindle is to education as Princeton is to making money.
Kindle = Money Pit;
Princeton = Money Pit;
Therefore...
Princeton = Kindle;
(I thought they'd be smart enough at Princeton to see the reflective insult)
Pretty sure the Princeton grad fatcats on wall street don't think of it was a money pit so much as winning the lotto. Going to a good school is really about being able to rub elbows with the legacy set as well as being able to score interviews with companies largely run by alumni.
Well worth the cash, unless you want to do English lit, although if you rub elbows with the right people even an English lit degree could be pretty lucrative.
Amazon and others have had many years to address these specific complaints. They haven't done anything after several iterations of their own models.
Despite of several iterations, eReaders are still a immature technology. For example, refresh is slow, display is only gray scale. At the moment, they are wonderful devices for reading novels; In the future, there is no doubt that all these criticism will be addressed, slowly. A long way to go.
Sounds about right.
"meaningless for anyone working from analog books"??
But aren't page numbers also meaningless for anybody working from a *different edition* of the same book? I would just consider this a different edition.
The problem with THAT thinking is that when making annotations you can cite the source as being from "Book Blah 3rd Edition"... on the kindle you can change the font size so page numbers will most likely vary from kindle to kindle as well the books.
Oh.
Location numbers are tied to blocks of text and so are not affected by font size or Kindle used. Being a student, I would still like to see the original page number accessible for citations. Other e-book software (e.g. Logos) does this, bridging the two worlds ("Hey, turn to page 45.")
@BTate: It's pretty clear you've never used a kindle or even the free iphone kindle app, otherwise you'd know how wrong your statement is.
BTW, the iphone app doesn't get newspaper or periodical subscriptions.
Page numbers are extremely important when you need to cite your sources and there is more than one edition of the book. I found this out last week (not that I did not already know this) when I could not find my edition of an 19th century book (published in 1853 I think). I used the one in the library which was published in 1867 (or something like that). Later I realized that the page numbers were off by a wide margin. Good thing I used the correct edition when I cited from the school's book don't you think? :)
Locations on a Kindle edition are exactly analogous to page numbers on a specific print edition of a book. They are always consistent within that edition but do not directly match the page numbers in another edition. You still have to have access to the specific edition if you really want to verify the citation. Doesn't matter if it is Kindle or 4th edition from an obscure press.
The same angst happened when the web came around and people wanted to cite URLs. The academics were insistent that it was not possible to cite something without page numbers. Eventually citation rules were updated to provide a format for doing so. (not getting into a discussion about whether citing a website is a good thing, just that it can be done).
After the initial hand wringing, academic organizations will likely find that they really can access Kindle locations in a citation, too.
Das what I was sayin before!!!
Killer! Noone even got that!
Sounds like the perfect time for Sony or iRex to sweep in there and get some good press for their products.
Surprised they didn't just test these simple things out beforehand. What they really need is stylus input and hand writing recognition. Just license it from Microsoft and get it over with. Remove the keyboard and cut the bezel down 1cm and it will be useful for this kind of stuff.
Nothing is better than real paper !
Really, the loss of the find functionality kills the whole paper idea. Key feature that paper has been missing for a while now.
I need some sort of magical book-like device that lets me crtl+f stuff, but also lets me jam pens, calculators, and fingers between different pages when I'm quick-referencing stuff to solve a physics or math problem. I think if I had used a Kindle when I did physics in university, I would have thrown it at a brick wall out of frustration in about five minutes.
How about the table of contents and the Index? They worked for me all those years.
For people who are studying in the field of science, nothing can beat paper textbooks. You just cannot write equations and notes as effectively in a Kindle.
@Will
Why don't you just write your equations and notes on a notepad?
Surprise?
Don't worry Mr. Bezos, we still love you at DeVry.
That settles it. I'm not going to Princeton.
Have you ever tried reading a Kindle book on the iPhone. Completely useless.
I thought the Kindle was always aimed more at people wanting to read novels. A good e-reader for college would need to be bigger and wider so that it could display textbooks without reformatting. And a touchscreen for highlighting would be nice.
It is.
The problem is that some seem to want it to be a universal replacement for all books.
It's not.
Amazon would love it if they could get in on the ground floor with universities before the others, but not a chance. Anybody who has used a reader for more than a few minutes can tell that it is not the right tool for this task. This is a hardware shortcoming. No amount of software or UI tweaking will fix it. I could write out a list of problems that they can not solve right now. And I'm not even at university.
The problem I see in that is you don't really have too many benefits over a book when reading a novel. I don't think many people read multiple novels at the same time and even the largest novel isn't that much bigger or heavier than the kindle. In the academic sense however, a e book reader has a lot of possible advantages. You can do quick searches, you can carry multiple reference books and books for all your classes. You can take notes, solve mathematical equation directly in the book, delete them later or send them off to your professor. All this is not their yet but I think that in the future the benefits will out way the negatives in a academic setting.
E-Book readers are probably amazing to use for a quick reference and on-the-go... but whatever concept we have now can't beat a stack of opened books in front of you when it comes to academic use, like Nilay Patel once said (and as a law student, I know how that's like). My personal opinion of why books still beat e-books when it comes to assessing more than one reading material at the same time is purely convenience and speed. It takes too long to go through a random sequence of pages, or even multiple articles/textbooks. The speed of getting information by keeping loads of books with the relevant pages open are what these digital readers need to beat.
Even my laptop, with multiple .doc's open, is a pain to alt+tab/(cmd+`) through.
Probably one day when E-books are cheap enough to just throw around and have them loads of them with different materials showing at the same time, but then again... isn't that what the Kindle's selling point is trying to prevent?
However, for note taking, the Microsoft Courier comes very close (at least in concept) to what I'd pick up the moment it's launched, if they can replicate the feel of pen against paper.
Sorry. Ranting.
Apparently these kids are just angry that Princeton canceled the Segway pilot program and replaced it with the Kindle DX pilot program.
Psh in my opnion if im spending upwards of $100 min per book..they should give me a little CD that has the book in a PDF version that i can place on my iTouch or laptop...it would make life so much better.
ctrl+f = easy studying/hw
Wow I go to Princeton and I just read this in the actual Daily Princetonian this very morning. Wow word gets around fast...
So, if the Kindle DX is not good for students, and its crappy handling of PDFs makes it crappy for business users, just who is buying the DX? No one? Oh. That explains why I have yet to see one.
No, its not the Kindle (or any other e-reader) who has "crappy handling of pdf's". It is PDF that is crappy. It is NOT designed to work on more than the page size the original document was written/formated for. E-readers all attempt to "reflow" the pdf pages to something that will fit on their device but it is an exercise in futility. Unless you have an exceedingly simple document you will have problems which range from the mildly annoying to the completely useless.
@Unknown @ >> "E-readers all attempt to "reflow" the PDF pages to something that will fit on their device but it is an exercise in futility."
I've never seen a PDF on a DX so forgive me...
Why does it need to reflow anything? Why can't it just display it like normal, and allow zooming and scrolling? When I look at a PDF on my computer screen... it zooms to fit. And I can zoom and scroll as needed.
I can look at full web pages with the Bolt browser on my Blackberry... and it renders the page like normal. But I can scroll around to see everything. It doesn't attempt to mash everything together to fit a tiny screen.
Or does the Kindle not have some sort of navigation arrows?
the pdf format was designed to accommodate real-world paper documents, not an over-priced and overly proprietary gadget. how exactly does that make it "crappy"? pdf is, in fact, the best file format for the long-term storage of electronic documents, as well as scanned originals. we'll see how much you love your kindle when you can't open all the books you've bought in another 10 years.
Actually, PDF is a very "dumb" format. It has no internal representation of the meaning of its content, just the low level representation of how it would have been printed on a particular sheet of paper. There are no paragraphs, columns, tables, headings. Just low level strings, filled areas, etc. This makes it a very rigid format that is not suitable to varying screen sizes. Other formats like html, rtf, doc, etc are much more flexible.
On a large fast screen like a computer, you can zoom in and out and quickly pan back and forth. It is a pain to do so but it is feasible. An e-ink screen is not yet fast enough to make the zooms and pans a palatable process. The Kindle displays the PDF full page on the screen, if the original font is small or the original sheet size is large, it will be hard to read. I would imagine that their next software version will provide some kind of zoom/pan, but it is not in this initial version.
Damn, it feels weird to read an article on Engadget so close to home lol.
I've finished four books on my iPhone using Stanza, what's your point
I use my Kindle 2 every night to read in bed, and it's excellent for that, but only for page turning novels. It is dismal for any sort of reference material that requires paging around. Even jumping back a chapter to check something and return is tedious at best. Annotating and marking are also tedious and I rarely do it. But if you want an excellent way to read linear stuff like novels, it's excellent.
What it needs
- fast book-like navigation
- a stylus/highlighter
- speed (it's way to slow for anything but, again, a page turner)
but clearly not too much of a page turner. otherwise you couldn't read it fast enough.
Mr. House PLEASE stop associate every piece of technology with your shiny iPhone or iPod Touch....
Now, if anyone saw him on these posts...
GPU on Netbook = new iPhone???
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/28/gpu-accelerated-720p-flash-video-gets-demoed-on-a-netbook-smoot/
iPhone over BL20's huge 21:9 screen????
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/28/lgs-bl20-chocolate-gets-official-with-269-price-tag/
I am very sick of these posts, sometimes I just wonder are Apple fanboys on engadget are all Microsoft employees for the sake of making Apple look bad.
Yea, I think a Kindle can be a great tool if you enjoy reading novels. Is it worth it value-wise? I don't know, though I know my Grandma likes hers, for example, because she can blow up the type. How do you value something like that.
With that said, I don't think it is anywhere close to a replacement for a newspaper. And I don't think it is anywhere close to a replacement for a text book. Both need a larger format, both need color these days and both need the ability to quickly skim through and flip pages.
oops, BL 20 is slightly different...
Anyway still better since it has a REAL keypad.
go with Sony Reader!
seriously Sony has already roll out several generation, and it's getting better and better....