Quote:
Originally Posted by Alisa
I think ebooks will revolutionize education but not the Kindle itself as it stands today. Eventually the hardware will catch up in functionality to truly make studying easier. It's not there yet. Ebooks will make it easier to navigate books, search on related topics, and recombine the information. Eventually, you will be able to integrate lesson plan data with the book. However, I think the biggest change will be simply in the access to information. As hardware costs go down, it will be far easier to bring an internet connection and computers to a small village in Africa than it will be to bring a library.
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I agree, especially with the word
will. Ebook devices will hopefully become fast and useful enough for academia, or notebook computers with great portability and battery life will make it easier to use ebooks for many educational purposes.
Kindles and Sony Readers and the like still come up quite a bit short. Their biggest advantage now is the combination of light weight with long battery life. Paper has a much better battery life and offers far superior reading quality, but accumulates quickly and becomes much heavier and less portable than an ebook reader. A nettop has a decent portability advantage and very broad functionality, but generally lackluster battery life, and currently limited sunlight readability (but good low-light viewability). Ebook readers have terrible usability and very limited functions, but they do offer a crude, primitive document reader with pretty good thinness and very good battery life.
All of them have some kind of advantage or another, and the latter two groups are going to evolve a bit more. Whichever one becomes a great tool for book replacement first is hard to say, but I will say this about today's tech: I can absolutely recommend a netbook to students if they have a lot of academic reading to do beyond novels and short stories, and I will not recommend an ebook reader to any student unless they have money to burn and want to do a lot of casual reading in addition to their studies. If there are more lightweight strong-battery netbooks with transflective displays like Pixel Qi in the near future, that gap will get even bigger for a while.