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Originally Posted by meromana
There's no doubt that the darn textbooks are heavy, and the Kindle will be nice for that reason, but beyond that, this does indeed sound like a very bad deal for the school system and us taxpayers, and not just because they overpaid.
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Uh, they didn't overpay. They're probably getting the Kindles at cost.
Seriously, have all of you forgotten that e-Ink devices were over $250 just a few months ago, and nearly $400 less than a year ago?
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Originally Posted by meromana
Right now, the school system will certainly NOT be saving money with this move.... they won't be saving any money on the books if they can't easily re-use them for the next 10 years, as they do now with paper books
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Try again.
The textbooks are currently cheaper in e-book form, by around $15 a pop. If a student has, oh, 7 classes a day, that's $105 saved per student. If the ebook can be used for 3 years, even with some losses of the device they will save money -- especially since textbooks are often ruined over the course of a school year.
The ebooks cannot be damaged or lost, and students will have to pay if the Kindle is lost. Throw in some free copies of the complete works of Shakespeare, and Bob's yer uncle.
(You really think textbooks last 10 years? Seriously?)
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Originally Posted by meromana
they have tied themselves into a single (read: monopolistic) supplier...
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Try again.
Sure, Kindles are tied in to Amazon, but can read books in multiple formats. An e-text vendor can use any number of formats, or list their books on Amazon.
Plus, textbooks are revised fairly frequently -- sometimes every year, especially in the sciences. So, since the school itself doesn't have to build out a complicated Kindle-specific infrastructure, they could easily switch to another system in a few years.
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Originally Posted by meromana
....they will surely lose a lot of the units and never get their money back. Do we really imagine the school will be able to collect when kids lose, break, or sell the units? Yeah, right.
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A single textbook can cost $95. If the student loses the Kindle, they've lost the device but not the $700ish of textbooks.
Plus, a student isn't going to make it too far if they've lost all of their textbooks in a single shot.
The program is unlikely to work out perfectly; it is a pilot program, after all. But given the possibility for major benefits of ebook usage in education, objections seem less like well-considered critiques and more like FUD.