Amazon inks deal with New York City public schools

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by dickloraine

Of course, but that is what I mean. Why choose a specialized device as the basic? Tablets are cheaper and have more processing power. And using android means you can easily add additional software and that on devices of different manufacturers.

Institutions don't like mixing and matching models from the same vendor, much less different products from different vendors. (Which is particularly bad in the android world.) It adds up too much complexity to their maintenance and support staffs tend to be small, especially in academic circles.

A typical institutional buy will airlift a whole boatload of the same model for everybody at once, budget permitting, or if not will arrange for delivery of the same model over time, even after it is superseded by newer "better" hardware. Things are a bit more relaxed on the PC side because they can lockdown the OS version for years on end (even reverting to an older release) but that is not typically doable with Android devices.

So no: mix-n-match is not a plus if the institution is doing the buying. And if they're not doing the buying--but going BYOD--they tend to put tight restrictions on what they will support. In fact, the appeal of Chromebooks in academic settings is that they don't have to do any real support on the client side because everything runs on the server.

Amazon has a pretty good cloud reader and a big bucks cloud services operation so they can easily provide the books and the app without selling ereaders or tablets.

[harriska2]

One of the articles from the OP stated this was for textbooks. Anything less than 9.7" would drive me nuts. I used to use the iPad and it was OK. Now I use the iPad Pro and it is *much* more usable in viewing multiple textbooks at the same time (with tabs). There is no way my PW Kindle would work for me for textbook reading. It barely exports annotations and is super slow for highlighting or marking. The iPad Pro, on the other hand, is blazing fast, highlights and exports annotations, makes notes in the margins, etc. You can even take notes on one side and have multiple texts open on the other.

[jhowell]

Amazon recently updated the Kindle for Android app (version 4.24.0) and the description shows one of the changes as "New reading experience for text and data tables with improved readability and navigation". I didn't notice any obvious UI changes with regular books. I wonder if this is referring to an improvement in textbook support.