photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Recently my husband passed along an interesting article he found in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about University of Wisconsin students using Kindles as textbooks. Here are a few excerpts:
Instead of lugging around hundreds of dollars in books in strained backpacks, 20 students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have little more than a pound to keep with them this fall for one class.
They are part of the university’s $10,000 pilot program introducing online retailer Amazon.com’s electronic reader gadget, the Kindle.
The Kindle has students eager to save money and the environment but publishers on their heels as the $25 billion book market stands on the verge of a technological shake-up.
So far, the experience has been predominately positive from the students’ perspective. One student estimated that he spends about $700 a year on textbooks and therefore expects the Kindle to pay for itself very quickly. Other students were surprised at how much easier reading on a Kindle was than reading online, and find less distractions available than they do when reading online textbooks. From a faculty perspective, “by UW’s estimates, students and instructors print off about 16 million individual pages on campus every year. That’s about 180 trees, not including the reduction in need for books themselves.”
I have written about my Kindle in the past and have just loaned it to my husband, who is currently reading the 800 page The Hemingses of Monticello ala Kindle — and he, too, enjoys the experience.
However, are we in danger of an Amazon monopoly? Beyond the positive attributes of saving time and resources, do you see any downfalls to this trend?
I read a review by YAle students also using Kindle for classes. Most of them sounded unhappy with the experiment — you can’t take notes the same way and it’s hard to truly study a textbook when it’s digital.
Still, this is an interesting concept. I certainly hope that another player gets in to the game because I am not sold on Amazon — and especially not the more it looks like a monopoly on the market.
Thank you, Rebecca! I love getting another perspective on this topic… Competition can only improve the concept, in my opinion!