This year, 62 first year students at UVA's Darden School of Business will be testing out Amazon's Kindle DX. The Kindle is a wireless electronic reader that is being tested at 7 different schools this year. Textbooks, case studies and other books can be downloaded on to this reader that is "as thin as a magazine and weighs just over a pound"!
To me, this seems like a great idea. It reduces the amount of paper used to create large textbooks, reduces the volume and weight of things you have to carry to class or the library (great considering today I almost toppled over on my crutches from the weight of my backpack!), and would help out those annoying times when you're trying to find a topic or citation that you know you highlighted somewhere in the 300+ page book with the search feature. And if you're lazy you can just have it read to you.
It seems like the outrageous costs of textbooks today could be slightly reduced by a universal transfer to the Kindle or electronic readers. I know you're paying for informational content and rights to the book, but there would be a huge reduction in physical production of textbooks themselves. And though the initial upfront cost of the reader is pretty steep, you can go on using it, saving trees and trips to the bookstore.
The new Kindle DX can hold 3,500 books! And it reads like 'real paper', and can go for 4 days without a charge! The only possible downsides I can see are the loss of the physical book (sometimes it is nice to have it in front of you), and having to read from a screen (but you can highlight and annotate), and then there is the possibility of crashing--does that happen to Kindles?
I'm pretty old fashioned and I like having the book in front of me, but it seems like they have thought of everything. I don't see how this won't catch on eventually.
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