Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129934270

by Kaya • 16 years ago

42 41 16 years ago

Loic2• 16 years ago

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.

joey_bananas• 16 years ago

> 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?

WalterBright• 16 years ago

The idea behind them was to remove the work involved in learning and the effort required to teach.

In exercise you cannot get strong without effort, and there is no way to learn without effort.

The most effective way to teach someone and to learn is with a teacher, blackboard, and chalk. Everything else is second best (including the wonderful Kahn Academy).

ugh• 16 years ago

… 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.

Loic2• 16 years ago

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.

electromagnetic• 16 years ago

I'm looking into getting a Kindle and I knew all you said before I've even picked one up. Perhaps it's only amongst us HNers, but this was a given fact for me before ever taking hold of the device.

angstrom2• 16 years ago

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...

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.

mattgratt• 16 years ago

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.

angstrom2• 16 years ago

Also, do digital books kill open book quizzes?

bobds• 16 years ago

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.

hugh32• 16 years ago

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.

nooneelse• 16 years ago

About page size... I wondered when the iPad first came out about the screen size vs paper textbooks. I thought it would be too small given my memories of carrying all those big, painfully heavy books around.

But I wanted to check my intuitions against some facts. And I happily remembered that I have an old _An Introductory Course in College Physics_ from 1958 on the shelf. The pages from 1958 measure 5 1/4" by 8 1/4". Much much smaller feeling than the (typical from my college time) Tipler, _Physics_, with pages of 7 1/2" by about 11".

But the diagrams are not worse in any substantial way on the smaller pages. And the text is all quite clear and elaborates things quite well. Only very few of the larger tables, like the one showing the moments of inertia for various shapes, take up the entire, larger page in the younger book.

So I guess my point is, textbooks can work just fine with smaller pages if they are laid out with that in mind. The benefit of focusing the reader's full attention on a few diagrams and explanations at a time might easily outweigh being able to pack more information on a larger page.

hugh32• 16 years ago

You're right, there's no need for undergraduate textbooks to be nearly as big and as heavy as they are -- they merely got that way in order to justify their enormous pricetags. With a book like Tipler I'm pretty sure the material could be rewritten in a book half the size.

Physics textbooks rapidly get smaller and lighter the more advanced the material gets, though.

ja27• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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...).

sukuriant• 16 years ago

The main reason I completely turned down the kindle was the note-taking method. It's poor, in my personal and arrogant opinion. When I'm writing notes in books, it's just that, writing them. I want to use my hand to carve out words in a way that's not as impersonal as typing a text.

For that reason, I'm looking into the new Sony eReaders[1], specifically the 650, because they have a touch-screen that you can write on and not-too-bad note-taking capabilities. For the price, I think they're going to be the best of the eReaders for higher education, if people can just find them.

[1] http://tinyurl.com/2usvro8

gamble3• 16 years ago

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.

markbao2• 16 years ago

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.

gamble3• 16 years ago

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

forgottenpaswrd3• 16 years ago

I would say the entry point is less than 100$(nikon coolpix) plus making photographs. Scanning takes so much time. Good ones uses 600$ canon or nikon(you can share use a friend digital camera)

Today people can share(or rent) relatively expensive scanners(1000$) with ultrafast feeders(any book in less than a minute) it they don't care about destroying the original book(just "guillotine them"). I had so many books that I did it with hundreds of them, my entire collection will be digital some day.

It hurt the first time I did it, but there are so many advantages(you can move with all your books, no weight, search funtion, indexing, digital notes)

_grrr• 16 years ago

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.

lowglow• 16 years ago

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

devmonk• 16 years ago

"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.

gcheong4• 16 years ago

I wonder if this is referring to the "unique" way the Kindle has of referring to locations in a text. You can't just tell it to "go to page 10" but instead have to give it some rather odd looking location such as 1768-79.

kjuhyghjk• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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).

rbranson• 16 years ago

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.

sprout2• 16 years ago

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.

forgottenpaswrd3• 16 years ago

"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.

sprout2• 16 years ago

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.

confusedcitizen• 16 years ago

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?

ezy• 16 years ago

My feeling is that, if I could have an electronic version that you could mark up appropriately -- I would start to get the same feeling about the personalized electronic copy as well.

However, there is one huge problem with textbooks on things like an iPad, that I've already run into in other contexts, and it has nothing to do with feel, or annotation (which still sucks on an ipad): You can't have more than one book open at one time. Not multitasking in the ipad sense, but literally, two ipads. Can't do it unless you spend another $600.

My feeling is that these device are the future, but two(three) things need to happen -- you need to be able to write/draw on these just as well as you can on paper (or close to it). And they need to be dirt cheap enough that everyone has three of them handy (and can have them communicate seamlessly).

forgottenpaswrd3• 16 years ago

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.

gcheong4• 16 years ago

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

gcheong4• 16 years ago

Reed did publish a findings report from their Kindle trials: http://web.reed.edu/cis/about/kindle_pilot/Reed_Kindle_repor...

mitjak• 16 years ago

What's with HN and completely inappropriate titles lately?

xtho• 16 years ago

"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.

Kindle found to be worse than paper textbooks

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