

Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks - Kaya
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129934270

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Loic
Very 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.

~~~
ugh
_… basically the new "interactive CDROM" …_

I don’t think that’s a fair description. Why were interactive CDs so horrible?
Well, you needed this huge clunky machine (the wall of screens between teacher
and students) which takes ages to start, you need to find the damn CD and you
need to wait forever until the program is loaded. Oh, and that whole
interaction thing with the mouse was very clunky. [+]

The new tablets are small, lightweight, you don’t have to boot them up and
apps load practically instantly.

I wouldn’t be too dismissive of them. They are a far cry from the old
experience. It still might not work but I don’t think it’s enough to say “Oh,
just like the old CD-ROMs!” and leave it at that.

[+] To be fair, I think that horribly production values had also something to
do with it. That’s something new devices can’t remedy but I think we are a lot
more experienced and have better tools today. The technology and our knowledge
is more mature.

~~~
Loic
I am not dismissive, but writing scientific publications is really a hard
work. Really hard work, even in black and white with just a few illustrations
and tables.

So, I do think that we will be able to get wonderful tablet based text books,
but it will be for main stream topics (most likely all the undergraduate
stuff, like the Feynman books in physics) and not cutting edge.

This is why I put them at the "interactive CDROM" level, in the sense that it
will be available for topics which were covered with these CDROM.

On a side note, I really hope people will produce a lot of good content for
the tablets and make the content available for not a lot of money. The more we
get people to know what is science, what we do as scientists, how we try to
reason on problems and argue with data and theories based on data, the better
the world will be.

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gcheong
It's interesting they chose to interview a professor from Reed given that the
CEO of Apple dropped out of Reed and Reed has always been rather Apple centric
when it comes to computing platforms for students (
<http://www.reed.edu/cis/about/computing_faq.html#typesused>). It would have
been interesting to see if the opinions given here were shared with other
institutions that are participating in the iPad/Kindle trials.

I can't say for sure, but this article seems awfully close to this:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

~~~
gcheong
Reed did publish a findings report from their Kindle trials:
[http://web.reed.edu/cis/about/kindle_pilot/Reed_Kindle_repor...](http://web.reed.edu/cis/about/kindle_pilot/Reed_Kindle_report.pdf)

------
bobds
The 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.

------
confusedcitizen
Maybe I'm being a prude, or maybe it's just inertia, but does everyone have an
easy time replacing a textbook with an electronic device? An argument can
probably be made about how ever-advancing technology might make note-taking
(and the like) easier, but I often have a hard time detaching myself from the
(very) personal experience a book ends up being. I don't just mean the
contents of it, but also the feel of having a book in your hand and it being a
companion. So much so, that there are times when reflecting back to certain
textbooks, I'm reminded of the how the book 'looked' and 'felt'. Almost like
how face-to-face conversation differs from over-the-wire.

Do most people feel otherwise?

~~~
forgottenpaswrd
People have associations and feelings about the things they used in their
lifes. That's human, we don't know it and like to feel that we are
"rational"(witch we are too but in a higher level layer) but we associate the
same Paulov dogs did.

I loved so much fried chicken I got a so badly indigestion that I don't like
it anymore(my mind associated it with bad feelings, so much pain)

My grandpa gave me a book before dying, and that made that book (and to a
lesser extent all books)special. My first girlfriend send me notes on a book.
My family read a lot of books. I learn a lot from books, enjoyed some books a
lot, and in general had good experiences with them.

But young people will have good experiences with ebooks-tablets as good as we
had with books. Maybe their first girlfriends will send then furtive IM
messages they will later remember later in life, whatever. They won't
understand how we can use those old and stupid things that can't display
movies or read text.

They will have children with different devices and we will die and nobody will
use books anymore.

------
mattgratt
Is 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.

~~~
angstrom
Also, do digital books kill open book quizzes?

------
devmonk
"To make matters worse, he says the Kindle proved unable to keep up with the
class discussion — it would take half a minute to load a page and by then, the
discussion would have lost its momentum."

1/2 a minute? That isn't how long it takes me.

~~~
kjuhyghjk
And who reads a textbook page at a time in a classroom discussion.

This is just an Apple ad-itorial, "with the iPad all the diagrams in your
textbook can be interactive"

~~~
novas0x2a
So wrong. Page-at-a-time is the /only/ way you use textbooks during class in
higher ed. You're expected to have already done the reading before class; you
don't /read/ the textbook during a classroom discussion. You use it to shore
up an argument (see the proof on page XX) or visualize a point (see the
diagram on page YY).

If the Kindle doesn't handle random seek well, it's no better than a textbook
in that regard (textbooks also fail at random seek).

------
sprout
Media, be they iPads or Kindles or paper, are not nearly so important as
content. For the average student, I doubt that either the Kindle or the iPad
can add any content that will offset the cost of the device.

The cash-strapped college student would be best served by a cheap netbook, or
if the student insists on a variety of media appliances, perhaps a laptop with
a large screen. That should be adequate for any sort of interactive content,
and a plethora of free content.

And of course, the student will require a healthy amount of discipline. Both
the iPad and the Kindle make great publicity stunts, but neither is going to
make a significant difference in a student's ability to learn.

There are a variety of interactive demoes that do help, but personally I think
people should be making those demoes available in cross-platform form, or on
some Linux/BSD variant so any cheap computer can be repurposed to run the
software. If you convince yourself that the iPad or the Kindle or the Courier
is the best device for education, I doubt you really have any insight to offer
on education.

Every device has strengths and weaknesses. I'd say the best devices to allow
skilled educators to create novel educational software are those that place
the least restrictions on the educator. That's neither the iPad or the Kindle.

~~~
forgottenpaswrd
"The cash-strapped college student would be best served by a cheap netbook, or
if the student insists on a variety of media appliances, perhaps a laptop with
a large screen. That should be adequate for any sort of interactive content,
and a plethora of free content."

This student will be best server for a cheap tablet, not laptop or netbook.
You need "portrait mode", instead of panoramic to really read fast and well,
there is some reasons for that( _), but laptops need to be only panoramic
because of the keyboard.

It is not a coincidence that all document papers are portrait, and xerox Palo
Alto graphical UI computer was portrait. Computers are panoramic because at
first they used commercial TVs(Steve Wozniak monitor) because it was already
mass produced and cheap.

(_)with columns like in a newspaper you are able to read "between lines"
because you eye see in a circle area. You don't need to move left and right,
just down. Your eye doesn't need to adapt to different level of dept, and some
more.

~~~
sprout
You're presuming a specific text-to-screen width ratio. I tend to favor
reading at very high font size on the 7" netbook I'm presently using.

Also, my finger/hand/arm never gets in the way while scrolling.

------
angstrom
The 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...](http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nookstudy/features/index.asp?cds2Pid=34666)

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.

------
hugh3
I 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.

~~~
ja27
A Kindle (or other similar e-ink device) would be great for textbooks that you
didn't jump around in, like literature or history. But even jumping between
reading and exercises is a chore. Typing notes is horrible on the Kindle's
keyboard.

But I could see a future where a student carried perhaps two 8"x10" e-ink
displays in a package no bigger than a composition notebook. They could have
two different page views of the same book (or multiple books), with wireless
sync between them. Touch (at least resistive) could improve the interface for
highlighting and some notes. It'd be easy to support slim wireless keyboards
for longer notes. I don't know if they'll ever be able to improve the speed of
the displays unless they change technologies.

~~~
Qz
Literature and history books involve ungodly amounts of page flipping when it
comes time to write your term papers (which for many students probably
accounts for 95% of the time they actually spend reading the book...).

------
gamble
The 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.

~~~
markbao
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.

~~~
gamble
In my experience, every textbook an undergrad is likely to use is already
available on a file sharing site or torrent.

~~~
markbao
In mine, it's not. 80% of the current textbooks I'm using (freshman textbooks,
at that) are unavailable on any filesharing site.

~~~
gamble
I'm speaking anecdotally, of course. I've had pretty good luck finding scanned
versions of my engineering textbooks, to put onto my iPad. There's only been a
couple of obscure or OOP books that haven't been available. It does take some
digging, of course. The initial sites were quite open about it, but the
publishers have driven it underground onto private sites.

------
_grrr
The 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.

------
mitjak
What's with HN and completely inappropriate titles lately?

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xtho
"For a few years now, people have been expecting electronic textbooks to take
off in a big way: They're cheaper than traditional textbooks"

Somebody never tried to get a site license for something that is worth its
money. Electronic media are much too expensive for the education market (at
least for universities etc.). A "traditional textbook" you can sell once you
don't have a need for it any longer. The effective cost is less than the list
price. I've also made the experience that electronic media usually lacks the
depth of "traditional textbooks" unless it's the textbook put on the web.

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rbranson
Maybe if the publishers will stop being greedy and start selling these things
for a reasonable price, they'd catch on like wildfire. The digital versions
are currently nearly as expensive as the printed version -- basically it seems
like they're charging the full price of the book minus the printing cost. The
problem is, the dead tree versions can be re-sold when you're done, but the
digital versions cannot, which makes them MUCH more expensive.

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lowglow
tl;dr: an ipad is better at being an ipad than a kindle is.

