Textbook Kindling

There have been lots of rumors flying around about a new edition of Amazon.com's Kindle designed for textbooks. If you haven't heard of it, the Kindle is an e-book reader that has become a best seller among early adopters. It has a special screen that, unlike normal computer screens, reads well in all kinds of light. It also has a country-wide internet connection which can be used to purchase books from Amazon.com directly onto the Kindle. It's not clear exactly who it was designed for, but among its current target audience are surely people who travel a lot and want to carry a bunch of books without the space and weight, or want to purchase new books without needing to be near a good bookstore.

With the rumors of a new version aimed at students, I bought a Kindle to play around with and see what its potential is. I've been using it for the past three months, on and off, and like it surprisingly well. Although we're a high tech company, many of us have luddite tendencies, including me. I like books. I like bookstores. I like browsing the shelves, taking a book home, and curling up with it. So I didn't expect to like an electronic replacement. But I've kept using the Kindle long past when I finished exploring it's capabilities. It has some silly sounding advantages that turn out to be really nice. For one thing, it lies flat. You can put it on a table or your bed, take your hands away, and keep reading. That saves some contortions when reading over a meal, or while going to sleep. It's also nice and small compared to most books so its easier to throw into my pack. If my eyes are tired, I can make the text size bigger. And the ability to download books and samples has come in handy on a few nights when I want something to read but am in no mood to traipse around to find a bookstore open late.

Some of those advantages would be great for textbooks as well. Textbooks are big and heavy and students have to carry several of them whereas with an e-book reader you could stick the lot of them in a jacket pocket. Downloading textbooks would be convenient as well, especially if that came with a price break (as other e-books do). That said, the current Kindle is missing a lot of features that it would need to be useful for a textbook. I assume the basics—showing pictures in the text, color, better formatting, a good search function—would be included in any version 2. That would make it useful for some kinds of textbooks for sure. But to truly make a good replacement may take some features that are harder to do.

One is good navigation. A book is easy to navigate—you can flip back and forth easily, put your finger in one page while looking back at another, quickly skim through a chapter, even rapidly flip through the whole book looking for some figure you remembered. All of that tends to be much more awkward on almost any computer document unless it was written specifically for the computer (think of scanning through a 600 page PDF file), and the Kindle currently has worse navigation ability than a regular computer. Search functions help, but are not a complete replacement—sometimes you don't know exactly what you are searching for, and then scanning a real book is much nicer. The Kindle screen is also very small—not bad if you are reading straight text, but it would not work for more complex layouts with figures, break-out boxes, etc. Beyond those things that prevent it from being a good substitute paper textbook, though, one of the promises of moving teaching materials to computers is to enhance them—with animations, interactive elements, links, models, and so on. The Kindle is a long way from doing any of that and its not clear its current formulation has a good path towards those abilities. So I suspect, at least in the sciences, the Kindle v. 2 will work best for study aids and other ancillary materials, but real electronic textbook replacements will still come first to standard computers —your biology textbook in 5 years will be on your laptop. Your books for history of biology may come on an e-book reader.