{"id":3785,"date":"2010-05-26T07:51:19","date_gmt":"2010-05-26T14:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=3785"},"modified":"2010-05-26T08:24:29","modified_gmt":"2010-05-26T15:24:29","slug":"uw-kindle-study-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=3785","title":{"rendered":"UW Kindle study results"},"content":{"rendered":"

The University of Washington was one of several universities<\/a> participating in Amazon’s pilot study<\/a> of the Kindle DX<\/a> 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<\/a> ) touted the advantages of the device for students, citing lower weight and cost compared to the paper editions of the same textbooks.<\/p>\n

The results<\/a>, unsurprisingly, were disappointing.<\/p>\n

\u201cComparing it to textbooks, it kind of sucks,\u201d CSE graduate student Ryder Ziola said. \u201cMostly the problem is that you don\u2019t 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\u2019s really good at stuff [like] that, but when it comes to actual textbooks, it\u2019s a\u00a0failure.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> 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<\/a> before they are accepted as viable replacements for paper textbooks and handouts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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., […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[175],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3785"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3785"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3800,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3785\/revisions\/3800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}