How’s the Kindle faring among students at five test campuses? Not so well, if you go by an AP survey. Among the problems: difficulty taking notes, lack of page numbers, less-than-ideal PDF display, screen not suitable for dim light.
At this point, as I see it, the Kindle is better suited for enjoying novels—straight-through, linear reads—as opposed to textbook use. I’m rooting for better technology to change that.
More encouragingly, as documented by PrimeImageMedia, someone thinks the DX make a cool teleprompter.
I read over at Andrys Bastyn’s blog, “A Kindle World”, that AP reported complaints about Kindle DX, but that while students could opt out of the program if they wanted to, none had.
It makes me wonder how we should interpret the ‘complaints’. The shortcomings are obviously real and should be addressed; but the lack (or very low number of) ‘opt-outs’ seems to indicate that this technology truly is viable for higher education, even if it still needs to be optimized for the purpose. Personally, I would hate (for example) not being able to take notes on pdf’s — but I would want the device to become able to handle that in the future, after a firmware upgrade, or in the next model. I would *not* prefer to go back to printing my pdf’s and keeping them in folders in a file drawer.
I don’t understand this “no page number” stuff. Granted, I don’t have a kindle, but I’m under the impression that it has some kind of page numbering similar to ADE that is given to the sections of text in the document, and therefore won’t change with the text size. If so, what’s the problem? When you cite the book, just say “Kindle Edition”–which one really should anyway, since it’s not the same thing as the printed work. I always thought the method for citing in academic papers is downright stupid, but that has nothing to do with anything.
And of course, that doesn’t change the problems with note taking on the kindle and such.