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E-books ready to turn to the next page
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
The realization of the paperless book may finally be here. The Amazon.com Kindle and other handheld devices built for reading electronic versions of books, newspapers, and magazines are generating interest among avid readers everywhere. They are also causing a great deal of debate in colleges, schools and libraries about how to use them legally and effectively.
The Kindle may be right for you, but it may not be ready for campus and the classroom.
Spiffy device
The Kindle is thin, light and portable and has a capacity of 1,500 books, according to Amazon.com. The Kindle connects to a dedicated 3G network, as do mobile phones and other handheld devices. Always connected, you can buy and start reading a book only moments after thinking about it (or moments after a book is released).
More than simply a display, the Kindle will read selected text aloud (in a somewhat robotic text-to-speech voice), play audio files (it works with your iTunes), enable users to highlight sections of text, and look up words in a built-in dictionary.
Cost/price point
The Kindle starts at $300; a larger display version, the DX, goes for nearly $500. Even though e-books may be less expensive than paper books (most are listed at $9.99), Internet polls and discussions suggest that the Kindle is too costly for most users. These discussions and business analyst predictions also suggest that people will start buying a lot of e-readers when the price comes down.
The Kindle on campus
This semester, 20 UW-Madison students are testing the Kindle in a project funded by UW Libraries. The students' Kindles were pre-loaded with required books.
Amazon.com is testing the Kindle on at least seven university campuses this year. A University of Washington experiment has 40 graduate students trading textbooks and pad and pencil for Kindles.
Accessibility problems
The Kindle is not now accessible to blind students (despite audio and text-to-speech technology). Earlier this year, the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind sued Arizona State University, which had planned to test the use of Kindle, claiming that limitations in the Kindle menu prevented users from acquiring books and accessing advanced features. In addition, people who have trouble reading small print might appreciate the ability to increase text size on the device.
Textbooks
While e-books and e-readers might eventually reduce the cost of textbooks, there are less obvious factors to consider. One is the difficulty in referencing sections of text (page numbers are not fixed). Another is the e-reader's lower image quality and lack of color.
Some teachers like the idea of a device that can only be used for reading; others complain that this is a limitation and that it would be more effective to invest in laptops that can run other software, browse the Web, etc.
Challenges for libraries
E-readers have libraries scrambling to satisfy patron demand and resolve legal issues. A library in Mequon was the first in Wisconsin to lend a Kindle earlier this year. It has worked with Amazon.com to resolve legal issues and is now expanding service. The Kindle has proven to be extraordinarily popular at the library and has a waiting list.
What's next?
The Kindle may soon share the e-reader spotlight. Other devices and services being developed include:
• Sony Reader
• eReader from Plastic Logic
• Cool-er from Interead, a British company
• Apple Tablet, which could function as an e-reader.
Taking a different tack, Barnes and Noble sells eBooks and gives away its eReader software for existing handheld devices, PCs, and Macs.
And then there's Google. The Google Books online library offers more than one million public-domain books at no charge and has recently partnered with Interead to make them available on the Cool-er e-reader.
