Almost one year ago, Amazon launched the Kindle with the sole purpose of cornering the digital books market. For those of you that don’t know, this gadget is a fully functional digital library. Since our previous story on the Kindle, Amazon has made some much-needed updates including a larger screen, sleeker profile, and greater storage capacity. They have also integrated a 3G wireless network enabled browser within the system to allow for a 60 second download of your favorite title.
In an attempt to broaden the uses of this device to college students around the world, Amazon has made an agreement, dubbed “The Kindle Project,” with six universities. Amazon has agreed to provide the Fall 2009 freshman class of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Pace University, Princeton University, Reed College, Darden School at the University of Virginia and Arizona State University with Kindle devices preloaded with electronic versions of their chemistry, computer science and freshman seminar classes. This is by far the most optimistic attempt of a company to circumvent the high costs associated with collegiate reading materials. Amazon has already made deals with multiple textbook publishers to have their scholastic titles available for download by the fall.
The efforts by Amazon to produce a lower cost alternative to reading materials issued by colleges are fantastic. Seeing as how we are actively moving out of the analog age and into one of digital superiority, this gadget has been a long time coming. No longer will students burden themselves under the high prices and weight of college textbooks.
This device sounds amazing, but I don’t know if I like it. I enjoy reading. With this passion come certain properties, such as holding a paperback book or physically turning the pages. I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but I won’t be looking forward to the Amazon Kindle. I’ll take my overpriced paperback any day of the week.
posted on May 7th, 2009 by Jonathan
Tags: Amazon, kindle, Technology, textbooks
Posted in Books, Technology | 7 Comments »
May 19th, 2009 at 1:01 am
[...] most classes reuse textbooks from past semesters, there is a market for selling back student’s literature to book stores. The [...]
August 11th, 2009 at 8:29 am
I agree with you. The Kindle does not provide color images so basicailly using a Kindle to read a textbook completely undoes the work of Tom Suzuki who transformed the ugly black and white textbook by adding colorful graphic images.
Why would I want to read in black and white? How do you highlight text? Easily study for a test?
Some things need to be on paper and a textbook is one of them.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:44 am
[...] five years, I think the majority of students will be using digital textbooks,” says William M. Habermehl, superintendent of Orange County schools. “They can be better than [...]
September 30th, 2009 at 1:02 am
[...] a pilot program at Princeton to assess the value of Amazon’s Kindle DX for students, it seems the class has graded the gadget as a no [...]
October 6th, 2009 at 11:13 am
[...] to just removing the books from being able to be purchased, Amazon deleted those books from the Kindles of users who had already purchased the books. In this process, they also deleted any notes or [...]
February 1st, 2010 at 4:41 pm
[...] of the company’s newest gadget, the iPad, has set the e-reader world ablaze. For a few years, Amazon’s Kindle has lead that market, making it possible to read everything from novels and cookbooks to magazines [...]
March 5th, 2010 at 12:22 am
I’ve seen this in stores is it the same exact product?