The Kindle and the future of newspapers and textbooks
 

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I have been listening to a lot of talk lately and there is a debate raging about whether the Kindle (an e book sold thru Amazon, reader for those that don't know) may be the device that ends newspapers and textbooks as we know it.

The issue at hand is whether or not the price of the units, the functions (and lack thereof) justify the cost.

For instance, the New York Times would still charge a subscription but at a reduced rate


I have also heard that a few colleges and universities may experiment with e textbooks come this fall and while it may save students in the long run, the cost may still be up there...altho you have a $500 unit, just imagine your textbooks downloaded for 1/4 of what you would pay for them brand new.

For those of you in school now as well as anyone here that owns one or have seen them, what are your thoughts on the Kindle device and the possibility of it or future devices rendering print media obsolete?


There are a few other debates that i have links do on this subject but I will wait til later to post them.

You don't have to buy a kindle unit to get kindle books. Kindle is a free app for iPhone.

If Thomson West would make things like annotated statute books available via Kindle, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

In fact, for the legal profession, the Kindle could be an amazing tool if publishers would just catch up with technology. I'm sure they're pretty worried about DRM though.

True, but what about those that domt own an iphone or dont want to use a small device to read text?

What you pointed out has also come up in some these debates also.

They should make it available as a computer program as well. My husband has read at least 10 books on his iPhone. You can change the text size to whatever is comfortable for your eyes. He makes his as small as possible so he doesn't have to change pages as often.

I like e-books OK but there's something about holding a book that I don't know if I could ever give up. I've never used a Kindle before but I'm sure while there are some similarities to holding a book there are also a lot of differences.

I do read my papers online though. The only one in print that I bother picking up now is the Sunday NY Times.

@agzg. I have heard many similar arguments about "book reading" as experience.

I, for one, am interested in the studies that look at reading comprehension with print versus electronic media. Apparently, reading comprehension decreases significantly with the use of electronic forms. That concerns me when we start talking about print materials becoming obsolete.

I think the electronic medium really matters here. When I'm doing research on Westlaw, if I want to really get my arms around a particular case, I have to print it, write on it, highlight things, etc. (I have this semi-intricate 8-highlighter system I developed in law school, for some reason a holding just isn't a holding unless it's colored orange).

While I've never even seen a Kindle, I understand the technology it uses is e-paper, meaning that it looks more like paper than it looks like a computer screen. Also, gone are the distractions on your other monitor, all the buttons you can click, solitaire, etc. It's just a reading device. While it'd be difficult to replace actual print on paper (because you can write all over it, etc.), I think the Kindle gets awfully close.

If the technology could ever incorporate my highlighter system and the aforementioned professional materials, I'd be 100% sold.

You twitter don't you? LOL



Here is a portion of an article I was looking at last week:

Anyone who has even remotely followed the trends in textbook publishing will be intimately familiar with the cries of wolf that have periodically promised that the moment is here (or just around the corner) for the transformative shift from paper to pixels. "E-textbooks have been 'this year's breakthrough' for the last 10 years," said Richard F. Bellaver, associate director of Ball State University's Center for Information and Communications Sciences, who has studied e-book technology.

Some of Amazon's partners in the Kindle project, like Adrian Sannier, chief technology officer at Arizona State University and a self-professed "big Kindle fan," are extremely bullish that Amazon's gambit could be "one of the two or three major events that cause the digital textbook revolution to really happen," as he put it Wednesday. That is less because of the textbook-friendly improvements in Kindle technology, Sannier said (though he praised that, too), than because of what he described as Amazon's singular ability to create a supportive "ecosystem" for electronic publishing based on the company's unmatchable distribution model.

"What we've been looking for is the third party, the 'iTunes' in this crowd who can find a way to break the logjam" between textbook publishers and would-be buyers, Sannier said. "With the Kindle, from your bed, you can buy the book and 60 seconds later, you're reading it. With three major publishers joining with them, all the machinery exists to take their content and turn it into Amazon content very quickly. This could be the confluence, not only of a device but of an ecosystem for the device, along with the cooperation of leading publishers, that allows it all to come together."

The president of one of the other universities in the Kindle project seemed far less certain she was participating in a breakthrough moment. Speaking from a taxi on her way to LaGuardia airport after speaking at the Amazon event, Case Western Reserve University's Barbara Snyder said that she, like Sannier, is "personally a big Kindle fan," and that Case was excited that its faculty members and students, through their experimentation with and use of Kindle, would provide feedback to help improve it.

But Snyder also described herself as someone who "likes my old newspapers and books, too," and pointed out that even as digital books have emerged, "the fact that Kindle is out there doesn't mean nobody is buying books. ... It's great to have choice," she said, "and it will probably be about choice for a long time, and I think that's great."


Kindle in higher education

Also we aren't too far off from color devices and apps as they are already available in Asia (naturally!). I am also curious as to what will happen when more and more magazines become available fully to read online.

Like for instance, being able to download Time or SI or whatever you want to read. If this really starts catching on, I wonder how publishers will have to adjust to cutting back to everyone else down the line that gets paid like the printers, delivery people, newspapermen and so forth....I don't think this marks the absolute end of print media because not everyone will have one of these devices but once newer devices are introduced with better capabilties, those changes will be felt. Look how long the mobile phone was around before the near extinction of the phone booth (they still exist but are damn near hard to find!) it's been barely 20 years and now we are saturated but a landline is still needed.

@ Kevin (lol) Kindle device


And what you just said about highlighting....heard that one too...LOL

I'm a senior in college, I own a Kindle, and I've bought books I needed for classes on it. I love it! Only problem is, as Kevin mentioned, is the lack of highlighting options. When I'm reading something I need to use as a source, I underline, highlight, circle...can't do those things so effectively on the Kindle!

As an avid reader, I am very interested in the Kindle but am holding back from buying one for many reasons.
1. cost
2. I like to share books with others and something about not being able to do this kind of bugs me. Also, if a textbook is available, then it would be nice to print certain pages for study, research, highlighting, etc.
3. I have read some pretty disturbing complaints about amazon regarding customers who have had their amazon.com accounts closed and are no longer able to access their kindle library or buy other e-books. Basically, they have a device that they can no longer use because amazon got unhappy with them.

I am hoping that the technology becomes more user friendly (and affordable) because I know I will still want hardcopies of some of my reading materials. And this would probably supplement my library not take the place of it...

I have absolutely no interest in Kindles or any other e-books. I just simply couldn't give up real books. I'll read a newspaper or magazine online (although I'd rather have the real thing in my hands) and I'll do legal research online, but e-books? It just ain't gonna happen with me unless they stop publishing real books altogether.

This = me:

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I think staring at a tiny screen like that for as long as it takes to study and go back over things for class, that your eyes would be under quite a strain.

Also, how would you highlight?

E-books will become the norm once they are used in elementary and high school - probably less than a decade. Just look at how children are using ipods, cell phones, computers, and games like the DS and Wii. During last Christmas, the younger cousins in my family were sitting on the couch text messaging each other on their DS. These children are 4-7 years old!
Kids are also being conditioned in school to recycle and be environmentally friendly. E-books could easily be seen as good for the environment and paper books as bad for the environment. So it is only a matter of time that we will become the old generation that still reads paper books!

you can set the print to different sizes. To me, it's the exact same as reading a paperback book without the annoyance of having to fold half the book back to see the whole page.
I believe the Kindle does have a highlight/underline feature, but I've never really used it. I just use the bookmarking feature.

Call me the luddite, but I think it will be a lot longer than a decade before schools are replacing books with e-books. So many schools don't have enough computers now. I just don't see schools having the money to make that kind of switch, or being willing to put what money they do have into that kind of switch, for a lot longer than 10 years.

Here's a link to a new color e-reader being offered for just over $1,000 in Asia. Despite it being obviously better than books and prospectively allowing public school students to be able to manipulate the way their pages look (i.e., highlighting and taking notes on the page), allowing content providers the ability to update things in real time, etc., I still see some major issues.

First, there's the middle man. Your bookstore and the hundreds of book wholesalers would be cut out. Bad news for them, good news for the publisher. Trouble is, this transition would be something gradual, so the wholesalers aren't going away overnight. They'll die a long, painful, loud death where they'll be doing everything they can to keep the print medium alive and/or put themselves into a position to try and wholesale e-content.

Publishers will suffer because with the ability to do live updates, they're going to have a tough time year to year in justifying new versions as all they'd normally have to do would be to send through a patch.

DRM will also be a huge issue. Invariably, someone's going to break the code and figure out a way to pirate this stuff. Further, schools won't transition to this technology unless they can realize some cost savings. Most primary/secondary school districts use their textbooks for several years, passing them from kid to kid. The DRM technology will have to figure out a way to distinguish between that practice and piracy. It'll have to figure out some headache-free way of passing the e-content from kid to kid without cost and without hassle, but still manage to protect the publisher's IP. That'll be a tough balance to strike. Further, I know some more wealthy school districts actually sell their old texts to poorer school districts. No one wants to see that mutually beneficial practice stop, so these rights will probably need to be transferrable to third parties outside of the school district. Again, a method needs to be devised to make that practice manageable.

For higher ed, I think these things are absolutely ideal for everyone but the wholesalers. Publishers get to sell new text to every single student which means (I'm assuming here), they could charge less money per text and achieve similar or better profits because the used market could (via DRM) be completely done away with. I would have loved to have one of these things in law school. Despite what some say about their old case books, I have been known to go back and look at mine. Color and manipulability is key.

For the legal profession, I think it'll be a cold day in Hell before Thomson-West makes their content available to e-readers. I don't think I've ever before encountered a company so desperate to preserve their DRM... but how cool would it be to be able to buy a set of the US Code Annotated [or some sort of expensive and extensive text you often need to refer to in your practice] (with all of your own highlights and annotations) to carry around with you in your briefcase?

Ok, maybe 2 decades. :D Also, it will probably continue to be the situation of the haves and the have nots. I can easily see more well-off schools going more high tech. When I was in college, only a few students in the dorms were fortunate to have their own computers -- the rest of us had to go to the computer labs.

Fast forward 15+ years later, even all the elementary school kids on my street have their own computers. I cannot believe how many middle school kids have cell phones and know how to text without even looking at the phone. These young kids are electronic savy and are growing up looking at electronic screens.

Ugh, my version of hell. My comprehension definitely decreases when I read electronic forms. During my dissertation research, I printed out all of my articles (and there were a LOT b/c my topic was covered in academic journals by not so much in books). I needed to be able to make notes in the margins, highlight, and cross reference. It was nice to have electronic resources to *find* them, but reading them is a different matter.

Plus there's something comforting about a book.

I can't see elementary and secondary schools switching to electronic format in the foreseeable future unless kindles become inexpensive (cheaper than the cost of one textbook) and indestructible.

My dad worked on a grant for the last two years that he was an elementary school principal. It was a "reading first" grant which provided the school with teaching support, technology, and training programs for teachers to assist them in learning new ways to teach reading. They got the grant and got probably 30% of the materials they would need for the program in the first year. The year after my dad retired, the grant budget was cut and they were cut out completely. Even if schools were able to get grants to provide kindles (as they are) to their students, the likelihood that the grant money would hold out long enough to support the program is slim to none.

College students are different because they are more likely to shoulder the costs (and see the benefits to switching to electronic format) and benefit the most from switching. Plus, if the student shoulders the costs, they're more likely to take care of the equipment or at least pay for it to be replaced if it's broken or lost. Elementary and high school students will probably not have that responsibility.

Bumping to say that I just had to buy a book on Kindle for my Directed Readings class. It's not that the book wasn't available...it's that my brand new (as in, never read, been on the shelf awhile) book literally FELL APART as I read the first chapter. I tried taping every page, but it didn't help. Ugh. Now I get to find out about notes and highlighting on the kindle! Woo.

CK, no offense, but you have to be the lamest, most not-funny sockpuppet ever to post here.

Kevin...where was the link to the color device?

I was working at Amazon.com when they brought the Kindle out. It's a neat little device. For leisure reading, I think it's great, but I don't think it'll be good for educational purposes. As a few have already mentioned, you can't write notes in the margins, highlight, etc, in. Also, you can only have one book open at a time. If you're trying to write a paper or study, you can only refer to one book at a time, which would have driven me crazy. I'm currently ghostwriting a book, and since I'm also having to translate parts of it from notes written in Russian, not to mention using other books as references, only being able to view one document at a time would add significant amounts of time to my task.

I think the initial cost may keep a lot of people from getting a Kindle or similar. I also figure most people will use it in conjunction with books.

i'm debating getting a kindle as a family gift. we're big readers (and i am a librarian) and my dad usually has 3-5 books near him at all time. having an e-reader will be good for its basic intended use, however by no means will it be a replacement for the book-learnin' going on in my house or my parents'. I am excited about the adjustable text (esp. for pops) anda whispernet/internet.

i'm not sure if i would get a lot of use out of it if i needed it for classes. i have a tablet pc (handwriting to type recognizable, all that jazz) that i am JUST getting the hang of, after 2 years. my learning curve sucks so i think the kindle will just be our new toy, not really a tool.

Kindle is not ready for school.

Amazon's Kindle DX is a lean and elegant eBook reader that may someday replace textbooks--or so they say. But is the device up to the task? According to a Princeton University study, the Kindle DX suffers from poor annotation tools and slow performance. And while future generations of Kindles (and/or other e-readers) may very well dispatch back-breaking textbooks to the trash heap of higher learning, they're not quite there yet.

The Daily Princetonian reports that the university's Kindle e-reader pilot program, which began last May, provided 50 students with free Kindle DXs. But after only two weeks, many recipients "were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices," the college newspaper writes.

Amazon provided the e-readers for three courses. The pros and cons were: Â

Kindle pros:

•· A single lightweight device, better than lugging bulky, heavy textbooks

•· The Kindle display is easy to read

•· It conserves paper

Kindle cons:

•· Annotating pages is difficult

•· Citing courses is a challenge because Kindle reformats pages and uses "location numbers" rather than page numbers

•· The Kindle DX is slow

I need to be able to highlight and mark up my book. :( Sorry. I like flipping the pages and fussing with the dust jacket.
<--- is a book snob. I dont even really like audio books.

I got a kindle for last Christmas from my parents, and I already have 5 pages' worth of books on there. I read so much. The great thing about it is, for those of you who haven't seen it up close, is that it really looks like a paperback page. I thought it'd be somewhat like a computer screen, but nope. You can't even really smudge the screen with fingerprints. I wish it would have some sort of light feature for when I'm reading before bed so I wouldn't have to have the room light on, though.

I do pick up an actual book and read it sometimes. I understand the feeling of wanting to turn actual pages. But to me, this Kindle is fantastic, especially when I go to buy a new release and only spend $9.99 (or less- in fact, a new book I bought last night was free for some reason!) instead of $27.99 or whatever they cost.

i love this! lol