Professor: Kindle is a “Poor Excuse of an Academic Tool”

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It doesn’t look like everyone at Princeton University is happy with the Kindle. At last one professor says that the device is a “poor excuse of an academic tool.”

“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.
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note:

anyone who starts a statement with "I dont want to sound like a Luddite" or similar is a total and complete moron and just scared shitless of anything with electricity or needing to change

in other words:
GET THE LART!
 
If anyone wants their ebook reader to be respected in the classroom, they have to offer these capabilities, point blank.

It's a multi-front attack...they need books available and the software/hardware to support it.

Exceeder
www.cepmcert.com
 
Probably one of the guys that writes a $150-200 textbook we need to buy for our classes...
 
Dang laptops and computers!

They're so clunky and cumbersome and they made me completely redo my coursework and scan all my transparencies into some crazy .pdf format!!


It's not perfect yet, but valuable suggestions (complaints) have been added that we can expect to be incorporated into ereaders!

Look at photographs, albums, and movies. People still have them and print them out or buy a physical copy, but many are interacted with digitally. The same fate is conceivable for books, it's not an if but a when. The kindle is *currently* great for periodicals/magazine type media, academic articles, and books you just buy to read. With custom indexing and tags and easier mark-ups (this may require an improvement in touch-screen technology) it could be great for academic text books as well. As someone in the field of physics, most of my textbooks (of which I have many) have nothing more than custom bookmarks/stickies. My politics, history, and literature books have notes written in and underlines/highlights etc.., but rarely my scientific/math books... even the ones I taught from. So custom tags for pages would be enough for me. Heck, if I could look up all the chapters and papers and sections from all my books I have tagged for one particular topic... that would be a great time-saver!
 
I don't get writing in books, it just annoys me, so I'll either devote it to memory, or take external notes

basically if I could view all of my books in Acrobat Reader, I'd be happier, because it makes searching for things A LOT faster than flipping pages, honestly, I don't care how much you hate technology, my time is more valuable than "lets flip through 50 pages at a time in 20 different books for a single line"
 
“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.”
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Katz also added that the absence of page numbers in the Kindle makes it more difficult for students to cite sources consistently.

“The Kindle doesn’t give you page numbers; it gives you location numbers. They have to do that because the material is reformatted,” Katz said. He noted that while the location numbers are “convenient for reading,” they are “meaningless for anyone working from analog books.”
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These are things that will make it impossible for the Kindle to catch on in the academic world, especially in text heavy disciplines. The lack of page numbers is especially is the kiss of death. You can't get through a graduate level course without an easy way to find page numbers and not having correct citations can get you bounced from a degree program at that level.
 
Moog said:
These are things that will make it impossible for the Kindle to catch on in the academic world, especially in text heavy disciplines. The lack of page numbers is especially is the kiss of death. You can't get through a graduate level course without an easy way to find page numbers and not having correct citations can get you bounced from a degree program at that level.
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and here's where I'll tell you we need a paradigm shift as the result of technology, in other words culture will change as the result of innovation, yet again (shall I cite the page and paragraph for this, or are you content understanding this is from lectures given by respected anthropologists, and books written by the same)
 
It's innovation in the sense of "doing something new", but new in this case isn't necessarily better. It's actually much worse if it disallows annotations, notes, etc.

It's a glaring omission that renders it's academic use moot. Likewise there's the issue of reselling analog books, lending copies of works to friends, etc. If Kindle manages to solve those problems and be as user friendly as analog equivalents then I'm sure adoption will be widespread in academia.
 
Lol another great example of people just posting random junk before actually reading the article. The professor pointed out some valid points.
 
Lifelong college student here.

The kindle is a great concept but is lacking in some areas that seriously kills it as a prospective replacement for textbooks.

I hope so much that it takes off but until they address some main issues it will not.


First off:

Your books are digital, you can go ahead and cut the cost of them ATLEAST IN half. I don't want to pay 120$ for a digital copy of a book that's BS.

It definitely needs page numbers.

It needs a more quick and adaptable interface that can be used rapidly.
 
sKiDmArK said:
Probably one of the guys that writes a $150-200 textbook we need to buy for our classes...
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no shit. when i went through union school, they made us buy $400 worth of textbooks each year and we didnt even use 90% of them:rolleyes: it was clear the union had business ties with the people who made money off those books, because when the class all agreed it would be way better to spend the $1200 (3 years) on laptops for everyone the trainers quickly shot it down without reason...
 
The best program I used in college was MS One Note. If a nextgen version of the Kindle had the capability to use a similar program as an overlay then it would be golden.
 
Teknikallysekure said:
First off:

Your books are digital, you can go ahead and cut the cost of them ATLEAST IN half.
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Not necessarily. The copyediting and typesetting of these books are a large part of the price since those costs are the same no matter if you sell 1 book or a million. With most college texts you're looking at a print run in the mere hundreds of copies, so those production costs are a large percentage of the final cost.
 
If you're going to Princeton, $400 for textbooks is pocket change.
 
Well by that logic and the rich straw man $1200 would be pocket change. It has to get to about $10,000 for old money to feel it.

As for the Kindle I'm glad I never used one. The librophiles in the English department would probably band against it.

It would be good for history classes in lieu of PDFs. Highlights without marking, photos, discussion perhaps.
 
I could see using something like a kindle for college work if the screen was color and had a touch screen/pen to go with it for easy notations and highlighting of text, but other wise it does seem a poor substitute for an actual book or an ebook on a lappy or tablet pc.
 
I honestly don't see what the big deal is, the Kindle is an eReader, not a eNotetaker. Honestly they could've just given them tablets with OneNote on em and be done.
 
lixuelai said:
Lol another great example of people just posting random junk before actually reading the article. The professor pointed out some valid points.
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This is [H], where you don't actually need to read an article or gain context before submitting your highly valued opinion, Steve included!

A student, not professor, had problems with it and their contentions seem very valid. It's not as if it's just one random person complaining about the Kindle they bought; Princeton has an agreement with Amazon to try it out instead of some textbooks and so far it's too limiting. Citations, highlighting, annotations, etc. are very simple features that are available with OneNote/Adobe Reader/Word and should have been part of the Kindle. eBook readers aren't the problem, underdeveloped eBook readers are.
 
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