The University of Washington was one of several universities participating in Amazon’s pilot study of the Kindle DX to see whether the Kindle DX served as a suitable replacement for students’ textbooks. About 40 CSE students enrolled in a dozen Computer Science courses participated in the study. A number of articles published last summer (e.g., Forbes ) touted the advantages of the device for students, citing lower weight and cost compared to the paper editions of the same textbooks.

The results, unsurprisingly, were disappointing.

“Comparing it to textbooks, it kind of sucks,” CSE graduate student Ryder Ziola said. “Mostly the problem is that you don’t have any sort of physical clues about what a book is like. There are a lot of things it is good at, if you are reading a novel, where you consume in a linear fashion. It’s really good at stuff [like] that, but when it comes to actual textbooks, it’s a failure.”

Students found it difficult or impossible to take notes or to write in the margins, to zoom in on details on a page, or to navigate within documents. This evidence comes on top of results from Princeton that also suggested the device is not well-suited for academic reading. I wonder how much evidence Amazon must collect before accepting the implications of these results: while a slate form factor is considerably better for reading than a laptop or desktop computer, it is not enough. Electronic reading devices must also support the wide range of interactivity and navigation characteristic of active reading before they are accepted as viable replacements for paper textbooks and handouts.

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