Local high school hands out 2,100 Kindles to students

[kevinp]

You have to understand that schools, like all government, work very slowly. The contract for the Kindles was probably made well over a year ago before Amazon knew what they would be selling them for today. When the contract was made, Kindle was still $259 (or whatever), so $177 seemed like a good price.

[Kali Yuga]

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.

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?

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

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?)

Originally Posted by meromana

they have tied themselves into a single (read: monopolistic) supplier...

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.

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.

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.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by SpiderMatt

A lot of people don't realize how fragile eink screens are. I can see this ending badly for some kids.

The students have the option of buying insurance for $20.

Still a cover is needed if they will be placed in backpacks. And I dont see any mention of those provided.

Plus, printed textbooks are available.

[JeremyR]

I really hope these were DXes. I would think textbooks are in PDF, or at least large books and thus need a large screen to view properly. It's like trying to read through a keyhole.

Nope, now that I look at the story. I guess if they are just for English class, it might work, since those had small books. But for something like science, with charts and tables and equations...yeech.

Even for history class. "Hey, it's a blurry B&W photo of something"

Also, at least on my K3, which possibly might be defective, it's remarkably slow moving backwards (not like when it's out in the sun, but probably twice the time it takes to move forward). I can't imagine
trying to look something up in a book.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by JeremyR

Also, at least on my K3, which possibly might be defective, it's remarkably slow moving backwards....

Sounds defective to me. Turning pages should be the same speed, regardless of direction. Also, exposure to sunlight should not slow down page turns.

[Tomsk]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Sounds defective to me. Turning pages should be the same speed, regardless of direction. Also, exposure to sunlight should not slow down page turns.

Not necessarily.
Going forward is easy as the Kindle knows where the start of the next page is, ie at the end of the current one.
Going backwards the Kindle has to calculate where the start of the previous page is, unless it stores the previous page start location in memory.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by Tomsk

Isn't there a sales tax?
$189 + 7% = $202.23
I'm British and know about the various US state sales tax, but not how it applies to items purchase over the internet.




I guess this is why they wanted the 3G version.
Also, I thought Amazon didn't disable stolen Kindles when consumers reported them stolen?

Generally, non profit organizations, and governement agencies, one of which it sounds as if this school is, don't pay sales taxes.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by Ken Irving

Hate to be a wet blanket, but they should have gotten a way, way better price than a $23/unit discount for such a large purchase, especially considering the fact that their textbook purchases are now a captive of Amazon. They not only paid too much for the reading devices, but now can't shop around for the best price on books. A good idea, but a very bad deal. Not the first time this has been done of course, as there was the Canadian high school that did this with Sony (http://www.photoxels.com/high-school...ks-for-ebooks/) last year.

Generally in the US, in government schools, textboks are bought by the state or school district. So, they would probably have had to do some negotiating between the Textbook publishers and Amazon in order to get the best possible combination price. They didn't say, but I bet the price quoted is with all textbooks loaded. In which case, it may be an exceptionally GOOD price

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by Tomsk

Not necessarily.
Going forward is easy as the Kindle knows where the start of the next page is, ie at the end of the current one.
Going backwards the Kindle has to calculate where the start of the previous page is, unless it stores the previous page start location in memory.

I've never written software for an eBook reader, but I speculate that they store between 2 to 10 pages in a cache of display memory for turning speed. (the amount of memory required is small) If the designers believe that people are more far likely to turn the page forward than backwards, they will try to keep the cache full of "Next" pages with few "previous" pages in cache.

But going backwards, you probably don't have any more than one "old" page in the cache. However many old pages you have in cache, you still have to promote all the old pages forward towards the 'current' position, and all the 'next' pages forward into the future read status and delete from cache those pages that now extend beyond the cache. Then you have to recalculate index of where the page stop and start locations are in permanent memory. This indexing is probably the big time user. Some of this could be done after the new 'current' page is displayed and the reader is 'at rest' while you read.

I would think you could promote/demote and display Pages in cache pretty quickly, but reading old pages from permanent storage could be time consuming. The older, slower, lower powered chips currently found in readers don't mutltask all that well so everything has to be done pretty much sequentially. So the illusion of immediacy is not created.

But if you use a faster, more current chip, this process could be sped up through multitasking. Unfortunately, this would likely come at the price of reduced battery life, extra heat issues, and of course the cost of more expensive parts.

Not to excuse the programmers, I suspect there is a LOT that could be done with the current OS programming to speed things up. But every decision you make has 'downstream' implications when it comes to response speed. Just one essentially 'correct, but not optimal' decision could have a profound impact on performance. A half dozen such decisions could create a byzantine network of inter-relatedness that is very difficult to unravel.

[leebase]

I guess color isn't needed for text books these days

Lee

[tovare]

I think it's cool that schools participate in early-bird experiments, these types of projects tends to hit a stumbling block or two, but they nearly allways succed in shaking up the status quo, which is a good thing.

It's not too early, because things will never change if it isn't effectuated by someone.

For instance - a blast from the past - CBT (Computer Based Training) is underused today, and it's modern incarnation eLearning is still somewhat emerging in many areas. (The technology was good enough in the 80's)

[mlewis78]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

Wonder how many of those will pop up at eBay and how many students will be prime targets for a street corner mugging on the way home from school. And doesn't the education authority realise they're buying into a closed-source monopoly? Very anti-American, I would have thought, chaps. Neil

That will be the day when someone in the U.S. mugs a kid for an ereader!

[eGeezer]

Originally Posted by mlewis78

That will be the day when someone in the U.S. mugs a kid for an ereader!

I'd have said the same thing about tennis shoes before the first person was shot because someone else wanted them.

Unfortunately, if it looks electronic, it will be a target -- even if the person stealing it doesn't know what it is, or how to use it (or is incapable of reading it, anyway.)

Sad, but true.

[SpiderMatt]

Originally Posted by Fbone

The students have the option of buying insurance for $20.

Still a cover is needed if they will be placed in backpacks. And I dont see any mention of those provided.

Plus, printed textbooks are available.

And apparently 60% chose to utilize the insurance, of which 20 claims have already been filed. Twenty out of 2,100 students (or the approximately 1,260 with insurance) isn't bad, but we're still only a month in. I also think it's funny that the guy quoted in the article calls the screens "demagnetized." The writer completely failed to dig around a little and print what the actual problem with the screens is, i.e. a broken substrate. Poor journalism. But interesting article, nonetheless. I thought students wouldn't like using Kindles to study, but this story makes it seem as though they find the advantages to outweigh the disadvantages. Good for them!

[tubemonkey]

Imagine the look on the parent's faces when they learn their kid dropped an uninsured Kindle.