Kindles in the Classroom?

Soon to be overrun by machines. Photo from our Flickr pool

KOMO reports that UW is testing out the use of the Amazon Kindle in their classrooms this fall.

The University's Computer Science & Engineering Department will give every CS&E graduate student a Kindle DX, which will replace textbooks and research papers in their first-year courses. Kindle-edition textbooks and other materials will also be given to them free of charge. Amazon's sending Kindle DXs to six other universities throughout the United States. UW will be the first to get the book-killers.

You can follow progress on the UW Kindle Pilot blog. Two posts in and they're reporting some fairly serious initial issues with how the Kindle shows PDFs--image captions don't display correctly, multi-column pages are shown as single column pages, and worst of all, the math doesn't work properly. These seem like pretty serious tradeoffs for freedom from gigantic textbooks, which, anyway, have their appeal--when we were students, doodling in the pages and highlighting key terms were the only thing that kept our grades up. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.

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By Regis Lacher in Miscellaneous, News on September 15, 2009 1:30 PM

Comments [rss]

PaJ

I think the "book killer" aspect here is actually a good thing. Though I'm a reader, book lover, and aspiring writer, as a current college student I can see the appeal of avoiding the dead trees version of textbooks. Last week I threw down for a $130 International Relations textbook that I will probably read twice. If (when) I do sell it back to my school's bookstore, or to another student, I'm only liable to get $30-40 for it. It's true that you can get used books, or do a rental, but most professors require a current edition- and textbooks are updated every year or two in a minimal fashion just to screw over more students. So if I can get a $20 digital version on a Kindle, sign me up.

Andrys

A small adjustment with regard to what is happening with PDFs.

The problem is with the fact that PDFs can be shown (very accurately) on the Kindle DX, but the license with Adobe for support of the PDFs apparently doesn't allow *annotations* to be made (the subject of discussion on Amazon forums when the DX was released) which can be a big problem in an academic setting relying on PDFs, which most do now.

So while the actual PDF layout for reading is good on a Kindle DX, with multi-column pages displaying correctly and the math working just fine, the University wants the -Annotations- feature which is not an offered feature with Amazon's Adobe PDF licensing.

So, the University departments are *converting* the PDFs to the MobiPocket or MOBI/PRC format which is basically the format for Amazon books before DRM rights-protection is added. This is quite different from PDFs.

Those conversions are done for the Kindle 2 because there is no Adobe support for reading PDFs on the smaller Kindle 2.

The conversions once done, allow those desired annotations (highlighting and note-making) to be made on the converted copy -- but the original layout, if complex as academic science books always will be, will be lost or mangled.

That's the problem they're facing.

It's not a problem for straight single column text, as in novels -- but for complex layouts, the conversions to another format just won't do with complex scientific books. I think the only solution is probably a better license situation with Adobe for fuller support of PDFs for editing/annotations.

- Andrys

kindleworld.blogspot.com