Princeton University to sell Kindle Formatted Textbooks

[daffy4u]

Christian Science Monitor

Just as Apple got millions of college students to leave their CD collections at home each September in favor of a tiny iPod, Amazon is trying to convince undergrads that there’s no reason to lug around a backpack full of textbooks. Just buy a Kindle.

This fall, Princeton University Press will begin publishing Kindle-edition textbooks. It’s on a short list of printing houses that are testing the e-textbook waters. (Kindle has also snagged Yale, Oxford, and the University of California.) But Princeton is the only to attempt a Kindle-first launch, offering Robert Shiller’s new economics book “The Subprime Solution” on the Amazon electronic reader two weeks before students can buy a hard copy.

[Gideon]

That is pretty damn awesome. I scanned in some of my texts last semester, and it was incredibly useful.
I doubt very much that much of the text books I'd use will be available anytime soon (Religious Studies major) but I think it's a great trend to see!

[jerryleejr]

As good as this may Sound I have found that even the most advanced search features still consume time sorting thru the results. And I have never been a fan of bookmarking because you end up with so many book marks you forgot which one applied to what you needed. For instance some online classes have open books tests, Could you imagine trying to find information in an Ebook, With the print book you can have open the pertinent chapters and have a little index listed on paper with your notes for certain material covered. And some info you still have to dig for in print. I like the possibilities with digital textbooks I just dont know about the practicality yet.

[HarryT]

Oxford sounds like a curious choice, gvien that the Kindle isn't sold in the UK! Perhaps they meant the Oxford University Press, rather than the university itself?

[zelda_pinwheel]

*sigh* i wish i had had ebooks when i was at university...

[markbot]

The Kindle would be great for the supplemental readings and handouts. And a Kindle version of the text book would also be useful in addition to the paper version....would make referencing much easier.

[carandol]

If only the iLiad had search facilities, it would beat the Kindle hands down as an academic ebook reader, because you can scribble all over the pages (at least in PDFs). But with no searching, and no bookmarks, it's fine for reading journal articles, but useless for longer texts because it takes forever to find anything. No point being able to underline important passages if you have to keep a separate note somewhere else of what page the passage was on!

This is is from experience of six months iLiad use as a history student. I used it for making notes in lectures, and storing and reading short articles, but for longer things (such as old books downloaded from Early English Books Online) I was forced to use my laptop.

The iLiad hardware has so much untapped potential...

[Gideon]

Searching works okay... but bookmarks are really the way to handle these things. The big drawback is, as you said, kind of flipping through the book. Unless you know exactly what you're going for, it's slow going. VERY robust tables of contents are essential.

[daffy4u]

My hope is that they aren't just slapping an existing textbook into the Kindle format. I hope they are really taking into account the strong and weak points of the Kindle and ereaders in general and creating textbooks that work well with the technology. I also hope this pushes Amazon to do a software upgrade to make it easier to organize files.

[Daithi]

I have a Kindle and I love it! But I think it would make a lousy textbook.

The Kindle is great at displaying text for things like novels or newspaper articles, but it sucks at displaying textbook type information that generally contain lots of tables of information, colored images, colored text, information in margins, boxed text, etc. Take a look at any highschool level biology, history, or mathematics textbook and then try imagining duplicating those pages inside the Kindle -- it just can't be done.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Kindle may not be the absolutely perfect textbook reader. But I think this is a good and significant start, and will hopefully inspire new readers that will optimize textbook usage. The boulder is finally starting to roll...

[RickyMaveety]

Oh, that is a nice thing to hear. I've still got a lot of my old college textbooks, but it would be nice to have updated editions.

I agree about the color plates and other formatting. I do hope that someday, someone, somewhere, comes up with the perfect ebook, size, format, screen color, the whole ten yards for textbooks.

Just lugging around all of my art history books hurt my back, not to mention my chemistry, physics and astronomy texts. That would have been so very nice to have an ebook that could combine all of them into one lightweight package.

What I would perceive as perfect would be a combination of e-ink with a tablet PC. By that I mean .... ok .... I'll make a list of what I would like to see in a ebook specifically for textbooks:

1. Screen that has text and images in full color;
2. With content easily viewable in bright sunlight;
3. A built-in (but not necessarily back lit) lighting system -- possibly something like the lights I have seen in watches -- that the user could turn on or off as they liked;
4. Ability to write on the screen - highlight and take notes;
5. A version of MS OneNote for taking notes and for collecting highlighted materials from the ebook texts;
6. Roughly magazine sized, to allow for larger color plates and graphs or other data;
7. The ability to split the screen (so that you could view text and take notes at the same time);
8. At least limited internet connectivity so that you could do research directly from the book.

I do love my Kindle, but I can see limitations for its use as a textbook depending on the subject matter. I'm also very fond of my tablet PC, which is great for reading books in PDF format. It also does a nice job of printing sections of a PDF book to it's own notebook format so that you can draw and highlight or take notes all over the text. The only problems with the tablet are (1) battery life, (2) visibility in full sun, and (3) weight.

So .... I would really love to see a product that combined what I love about both. Maybe even a fold away keyboard of the type my tablet PC has.

[ePossum]

A step in the right direction, in as much as the academic publishers seem to be completely inept a developing a proactive e-publishing strategy when left to their own devices. Given that their books usually have small audiences spread across the world, you think they'd have been motivated to do something about this themselves some time before now (no, I'm not bitter about paying high postage for delivery of expensive print texts from overseas...)

Yay for Amazon for giving four big academic publishers a boot in the pants.

At the same time, I hope that when the other academic publishers - the ones that publish most of the stuff that interests me - start to take e-publishing seriously, that they choose to publish in a format that isn't linked to a specific device, and that they don't lock the distribution down to a single retailer.

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by carandol

This is is from experience of six months iLiad use as a history student. I used it for making notes in lectures, and storing and reading short articles, but for longer things (such as old books downloaded from Early English Books Online) I was forced to use my laptop.
The iLiad hardware has so much untapped potential...

actually, there's a modified version of iPDF that does bookmarking, and which works fairly well.. the only thing really missing is a search (and making a ToC using acrobat or something generally helps)

[Elsi]

Originally Posted by jerryleejr

As good as this may Sound I have found that even the most advanced search features still consume time sorting thru the results. And I have never been a fan of bookmarking because you end up with so many book marks you forgot which one applied to what you needed. For instance some online classes have open books tests, Could you imagine trying to find information in an Ebook, With the print book you can have open the pertinent chapters and have a little index listed on paper with your notes for certain material covered. And some info you still have to dig for in print. I like the possibilities with digital textbooks I just dont know about the practicality yet.

Actually, this is one area where the Kindle excels. You can highlight areas of text and create annotations using the keyboard. The highlighted text and your notes are copied into a text file which appears in the book selection list as "My Clippings". In this file, the book title and clipping location is given (similar to the page number you might have on your paper index) along with the highlighted text and your notes. You can copy the "My Clippings" file to your computer for editing, printing, etc.