Quote:
Originally Posted by TadW
I know some of you may disagree, but I don't think we need a Kindle for college students. As a student myself, I cannot think of carrying a fragile e-book reader with me to school every day. I have my rock-solid Macbook, thank you very much, which works very well with PDFs and other e-book formats. And then there is the still hefty price tag of e-book devices... unless Amazon manages to get it down considerably, I don't think students will find much professional love for it.
|
Every time I was in a design meeting, as soon as people came into the room 1st thing is to find a plug to plugin their notebooks. After only few years their batteries degraded so much that they couldn't use their machine without being pugged in. In large univeristy classroms it is far more difficult to plugin. So the battery anxiety associated with notebooks would become a significant problem for students who often have no place to plugin.
I am not sure why eReaders have to be fragile??? Surely Amazon would design a more robust unit for students. No big deal.
I think that eReaders have 2 significant advantages:
- battery life means sudents don't have to worry about finding a plug
- passive screen much easier on eyes
When you spend a lot of time reading like students you come to appreciate #2 a great deal.
Of course, pricing is going to be the main deal maker or breaker. Students are price sensitive, so if they are getting a poor deal than they'll go with other alternatives including BitTorrent. Also they might hack Kindle and their DRM. I expect this new Kindle to fail due to pricing issues more than any technical spec.