Monday 9 May 2011

Kindle vs textbooks

Until electronic documents are as easy to mark up, modify, combine and carry as paper, it's likely the Kindle will not make great inroads into universities. That's a shame, because carrying one slim device would be far less cumbersome and painful than a pile of textbooks. It would seem like a major selling point.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's also hard to flip through the pages quickly to search for something.
PPS - Which I suppose you should do via keyword search if you can.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mail of the Living Dead:
A Zombie Mail Art Call
deadmailart.blogspot.com

John said...

Thanks for the link. I'm not really doing the zombie thing here any more, but I'll leave it up in case anyone's interested.

Stu said...

Perhaps if you had an app in your tablet which allowed you to link new pages to sections of the text books where you make your notes, kind of like an expanding mind map, would also be great if you could share and merge with other students in your class, allowing easy collaboration

John said...

That does sound good, and I'm sure someone could design the software pretty easily. There are even lots of mind mapping tools already out there to use as front ends. The question is whether the ebook software, wrapped in access controls, will prevent you from linking to it and augmenting books that way.