Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks
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Re: Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks
#2Very short summary:
- with the iPad you can do interactive books which are basically the new "interactive CDROM" you had some years ago. - with the Kindle you cannot easily flip through the pages and write notes on them, this is why it does not improve the traditional textbook.
Nothing new, you know that after 15 minutes using the devices. But I must say, to read novels, news and stuff like that, you cannot really be better than the Kindle at the moment.
Disclaimer: I am an avid user of my Kindle combined with Instapaper.
Re: Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks
#3The eInk ereaders are woefully inadequate, however, in 1-2 years I could see them being considerably cheaper and offering color as well. I doubt the iPad will drop in price. Until then I've been using Nook Study for 2 of my course.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nookstudy/features/index.asp?c...
The ability to have 2 simultaneous books open and displaying on a laptop is nice. It also allows split screen views of the same book so that you can view non-contiguous pages. This comes in extremely handy when doing problem sets that have the answers in the back of the book. Wish my math book was offered this way. Would save a lot of page flipping between problems and examples. It's also much easier to compose annotations than with an iPad. In hindsight, this will probably always be a shortfall of the tablets/ereaders. You could put a wireless keyboard on them, but at that point you might as well just have a laptop.
One thing I don't like at this point is the limitation of only being able to open the book on 2 devices that have my account registered (sort of like registering your iPhone with iTunes on up to 5 devices). From what I understand this is a restriction imposed by the publishers, not the distributors.
Re: Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks
#4Very short summary: - with the iPad you can do interactive books which are basically the new "interactive CDROM" you had some years ago. - with the Kindle you cannot easily flip through the pages and write notes on them, this is why it does not improve the traditional textbook. Nothing new, you know that after 15 minutes using the devices. But I must say, to read novels, news and stuff like that, you cannot really be…
> basically the new "interactive CDROM" you had some years ago.
And I still kind of think that was a solution in search of a problem. Are there any evidence that stuff like that helps learning?
Re: Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks
#5Is there any evidence cited here beyond opinion? Or, strangely, does Steve Jobs' alma mater prefer a more expensive and colorful device?
I think this is a difference horses for different courses. If you study English or Political Science (like I did), you'll probably find a Kindle easier to deal with. If you study biology, chemistry, or topics like that, the animations and rendering of diagrams on an iPad will be superior.
Re: Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks
#6The original title is "The E-Textbook Experiment Turns A Page". The editorialized title made little sense at first.
A professor that had students with Kindles says it wasn't very useful because it was slow at highlighting, note-taking and turning pages.
The CEO of inkling.com, who make e-textbooks for the iPad, thinks the iPad is better than the Kindle for interacting with textbooks. The professor is also hoping that the iPad will prove better than the Kindle. A couple students that already had iPads said it was pleasant to use in class but considering the cost, a laptop would also suffice.
Re: Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks
#7I use a nook for reading novels, but can't imagine using it for a textbook. Apart from the fact the page is too small, it just takes too long to flip back and forth looking for something, and that's the primary mode in which people use textbooks.
Besides, I still have my undergraduate textbooks from ten years ago on my shelf and occasionally look something up. If they'd been in an electronic format I'm sure it would be far too much trouble to find a reader for them.
Re: Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks
#8The academic publishers are in for a swift attitude adjustment when the average student realizes that scanned copies of almost any undergrad textbook can be found online. It seems strange to me that so many 18-22 y/o's won't pay $0.99 for a song, yet they're still paying $200 for a textbook.
Re: Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks
#9The reviews were not based on the latest kindle which is faster and more responsive than previous versions. However, granted that for interactive learning the iPad will excel, but as a pure reading platform the kindle can not be bettered.
Re: Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks
#10The academic publishers are in for a swift attitude adjustment when the average student realizes that scanned copies of almost any undergrad textbook can be found online. It seems strange to me that so many 18-22 y/o's won't pay $0.99 for a song, yet they're still paying $200 for a textbook.
I wouldn't say so. Pirating textbooks is much harder than pirating music. The entry point is $0.99 for pirating music; it is $150+ plus scanning (or somehow obtaining a PDF version of the textbook) for textbooks.