View from a Farley The Current Events and Opinion Weblog of Chris Farley

The Amazon Kindle in Education

It’s back to school for me on 3 September, but at the moment I’m fully engaged in buying books and such. Textbooks are, after all, important. Where else would one find either annoying but colorful blurbs on vaguely related topics surrounded by some content (at the less advanced levels) or remarkably dense, black-and-white books? These pieces of bound paper are worth something, though, because my books for this year cost over $600! The college students among you will probably ask if I left out a zero or two, but this is for 9th grade. $600 for 9th grade textbooks!

On top of that, the books weight about 25 to 30 pounds in total. They take up a bunch of space and are inconvenient to move and carry around. So what is the solution?

E-books! I can completely reduce the clutter, the tonnage, and the inconvenience. I can put all of my books onto one device. As far as e-book readers go, the Amazon Kindle is the clear winner for a number of reasons, including its ability to download books over the air and its independence from a computer. The obstacles to that oh-so-elegant solution, however, are not few.

First, my school does not support e-books at this point. With good reason as well! E-book technology has not developed to the point where it’s suitable for classroom use. You can’t take notes on the ink, for example. It lacks a built-in dictionary. The ability to configure many Kindles at once would be helpful for school as well.

Second, the availability of textbooks is a problem. McGraw-Hill publishes nearly all of their textbooks electronically as well as on paper, as do many publishers, but I’d have much more trouble finding my obscure French textbook on the Kindle.

Third, the design of the Kindle (the only viable option) would be problematic. It has some design quirks (the placement of the “next page” buttons, for example) and the screen is a bit small.

Like most things, all of this will be solved in time. My school (as well as many others) will start support e-books when the technology progresses to where it needs to be. The availability of textbooks is a work in progress. As time passes, more books will be published electronically and as schools and consumers switch to e-books, that will surely fuel more electronic releases. My design prayers will be reportedly answered as early as October with my small screen fears allayed next year.

With those changes made, Amazon will have created an electronic device that mimics most of the features of a regular book and enhances many others (please give us a dictionary that would allow us to tap a word and see the definition or something similar). The only “big” missing feature is the ability to write on the “paper.” That will help the Kindle infiltrate the education market because taking notes in the book is crucial for students. But in the case of a touch screen, write-able Kindle, it is not Amazon that is slowing the process. The underlying electronic paper technology cannot produce those results yet.

So it seems that my dreams of walking out the door to school with nothing but my Kindle and my laptop in hand are a bit far off. I’d probably still have to pay about $600 anyway because the high price of textbooks is due to the content on the pages, not the cost of the pages themselves. I can hope, though, as I’m lugging my books out my front door.