kindle dx is being used as a pilot project n many U.S. universities. The question is whether kindle can replace the paper book. It should be considered from both usability and cost perspective. On amazon kindle forum Christopher A. Hammer have recently expressed his opinion after using kindle dx as part of the university course. Here is his experience as he writes:
I just completed a 6-week summer session philosophy class at the University of California at Irvine. The course covered readings on pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle. For this class I brought four VERY USED and marked-up paper-back books in the student store for nearly $60. Although I had similar material already on my kindle dx, I needed the dead-tree-books so that I could determine the page numbers for reading assignments, follow along with the instructor when she read material from one of the books during lecture and so I could make appropriate page-number citations on the five written papers that were assigned for the class. Although my kindle was useful for doing e-searches, I could not have completed the course with only my kindle e-copies. Since I plan to keep only the kindle copies for my personal library, today I sold the used paper-back books back to the student bookstore for $16, even through the books were in the same condition in which I bought them six weeks ago. My conclusion is that it may not be cost effective for students planning to use Kindles for college unless their entire school has adopted Kindles schoolwide.
In reply to a question or opinion by another views on the forum he writes:
Page-numbering would have to be supplied by the publisher if it were provided. The kindle could not be the source of the page-numbering because one of the kindle’s advantages is the ability to change font sizes, which means that the amount of text on any given kindle screen-full would be non-standard. kindle’s attempt to make a standard referencing is to use location numbers instead, which are font-size independent. The problem with kindle’s solution is that an academic environment could ONLY use locations for references if everyone in that academic environment were using a kindle. The DX provides native pdf format, which might include publisher-provided page numbers–but the books that were chosen for my class were not available in kindle format and, in the academic world, even having the wrong edition of the same textbook by the same publisher and author creates problems. Using a different translation of Plato or Aristotle and a different publisher, with no common page numbers would have been unuseable for my classwork. For personal recreational reading the lack of page numbers probably doesn’t matter. But, in an academic environment in which the emphasis is on a common shared reading experience, this is a problem still hunting for a solution.
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