Any students using electronic readers for classes?

[SolRaven]

Originally Posted by teadonkey

Eeek. I hope textbooks don't go the way of eBooks. I am such a visual learner. I mark up my textbooks like crazy. I know you can do notes on eReaders, but it is SO not the same.

Plus, I'm a nursing student. My textbooks are enormous but I can't see anatomy and physiology type figures translating easily to an eReader.

This would work great. Every time I open up my A&P book I long for Kno to deliver my reader. Shipping has been delayed 3 times. At this rate, I'm just hoping to have it by next semester.

[corona]

My instructors use a lot of online sources, particularly journal articles. These are usually PDF files. I almost never print these out on paper. I read them and work from them on my computer, and use Calibre to convert them to ePubs so I can read them on my Kobo. Once in while I get a PDF file that won't convert to anything readable, but that's rare.

[bucsie]

how much does a kno cost? there's just a video on their web site, no price

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by bucsie

how much does a kno cost? there's just a video on their web site, no price

If you click through the "I want an invite" buttons, you eventually get to a price page.

Single-screen: 16gb $599, 32gb $699
Dual-screen: 16gb $899, 32gb $999

[oleoleoleusa]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

I can quite clearly recall my undergraduate days of luging around four one hundred pound textbooks ten to fifteen miles to classes. I think it would have been great if electronic readers were around back then. Just think one reader holds all of the text, no breaking my back with the four hundred pounds of text books, no lugging those heavy things in snow storms instead one reader that can fit into my pocket.

I can recall the campus book store selling out of the text that I need, happened all of the time. With the electronic reader thats not possible.

Grad school wasn't much better, imagine running out the door of the townhouse late to class with four hundred pounds of text in tow, not fun.

Are there any students on these forums whose electronic readers have saved them from the agony that I went through as a student? Have electronic reader helped you a lot?

A group of Carnegie Mellon students are creating an app to make textbooks available at low cost to students.

Check it out: http://www.indiegogo.com/ALIPT

I'm interested in contributing and pledge to do so after 25 people contribute to the cause.

[wyndslash]

nope, don't think my professors would allow it anyway. besides, i always write notes in my notebook.

and my university isn't as big as the typical american colleges, i suppose. and we're not really required to have or bring the texts all the time; photocopies are sufficient

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

If you click through the "I want an invite" buttons, you eventually get to a price page.

Single-screen: 16gb $599, 32gb $699
Dual-screen: 16gb $899, 32gb $999

Don't "Kno" if they are still going forward but if they are there is a Student Ambassador Program that appears to give those selected a 50% discount just for shilling for Kno and probably being a test subject.

http://blog.kno.com/?p=574#postTitle

[RainingLemur]

I wish that I had that option in school. My mom has all her new textbooks in a couple of e-reader friendly formats. She stole her boyfriends' Nook for a few of them.

Would've been nice to have as some of the damn books I had to lug around were just evil in weight.

[Catz2.0]

YES. Although I don't use mine for textbooks I use it for assigned reading in English classes. Its so much easier to have it right there. Sometimes I'm assigned more than one book at a time so its great to have them all in one safe place.

[SolRaven]

I can't wait for publishers to get on Inkling. I think that they have the best textbook product thus far.

[RVS78]

Just started to download eTextbooks for a couple of classes. The determining factor was cost. Sometimes the difference between a used print copy versus digital version was just a few $$. In that case I just went with a hard copy. Also lucked out on textbook rental this semester which helps reduce the cost especially for the medical sciences.

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[amybobamy]

I recently submitted a grant proposal to give an entire class a set of books pre-loaded onto an ereader (I'm a ninth grade English teacher). Most of the works we read are in the public domain anyway, and we predictably read most of the same works from year to year, so provided that the students take good care of the ereaders, a single good-quality one would be hugely advantageous.

Right now, California English textbooks weigh about eight pounds. Students don't carry them back and forth to school, they don't read them, they don't use them, they are almost entirely worthless -- but because of the Williams Consent Decree, schools are required to distribute one to each student to take home (and the same is true for all core content areas). One of the problems I am expecting to encounter is that a device may not satisfy the Williams law, which would be an interesting problem.

What I really yearn for is the ability to give the students an entire textbook that is easy to carry around, pleasant to use, and helpful. The ideal one will have a dictionary on-board, and text to speech so that the students may listen to works as they read (since a large number have no idea of what the words should sound like -- This is also a well-studied and highly effective scaffold for learning a language).

The current textbook costs $112, before we add district processing (labels and codes of various sorts), but is virtually unusable because of its miserable bulk. New editions of textbooks are "adopted" about every five years. The ereader I would like to get the students costs about $200 delivered, and will be very effective at making literature more accessible. But ... let's face it, it will cost about twice as much and probably last half as long.

This is a great idea that is still in its infancy. But I'm watching closely!

[amybobamy]

Omigosh, I think I killed this thread.

[physics]

It also depends on the sort of books you need for your classes. I'm a physics graduate student, and I picked up a kindle dx hoping to get some of my reference books on it. (After two years of lugging around those 600+ page books, I was pretty desperate.) I've found that whatever amazon uses to convert math and physics books to .azw format doesn't handle the equations well at all. Subscripts/superscripts are screwed up, Greek letters aren't recognized properly (phi to psi, etc.), and so on. However, one thing it is really nice for is having copies of important journal papers, so they don't get lost on my desk, and I have that one we were talking about 6 months ago handy for when it comes up again in research meetings. (Although, note the letter beta is screwed up for pdf's compiled with pdf-latex, as most physics journals are. Not helpful if you're reading about the QCD beta function.) So, if you're grad school and mostly looking at papers, it might be useful for that alone.

So, if you're an English major, sure, an e-reader might be good. If you're looking to stop lugging around math and physics books, well, I'd advise not quite yet.

[Latinandgreek]

Originally Posted by physics

It also depends on the sort of books you need for your classes. I'm a physics graduate student, and I picked up a kindle dx hoping to get some of my reference books on it. (After two years of lugging around those 600+ page books, I was pretty desperate.) I've found that whatever amazon uses to convert math and physics books to .azw format doesn't handle the equations well at all. Subscripts/superscripts are screwed up, Greek letters aren't recognized properly (phi to psi, etc.), and so on. However, one thing it is really nice for is having copies of important journal papers, so they don't get lost on my desk, and I have that one we were talking about 6 months ago handy for when it comes up again in research meetings. (Although, note the letter beta is screwed up for pdf's compiled with pdf-latex, as most physics journals are. Not helpful if you're reading about the QCD beta function.) So, if you're grad school and mostly looking at papers, it might be useful for that alone.

So, if you're an English major, sure, an e-reader might be good. If you're looking to stop lugging around math and physics books, well, I'd advise not quite yet.

I'm deciding between a Kindle DXG and an iPad 2, myself, for PDFs. I find that I can read many PDFs of journal articles surprisingly well on my Sony PRS-350, but some articles and scanned books definitely need to be read on a larger screen.