photo credit: oskay

Ughh. I saw this coming as soon as I heard about campus rollouts and testing…

e-Textbooks: How Apple Can Dominate the Education Market With the iTablet

“In particular, students and professors note the difficulty of adding notes, highlighting text and finding content quickly. One student called the Kindle DX ‘…a poor excuse of an academic tool.’ Professors are finding that they have to change their style of teaching because off the difficulties that students are having marking up texts. The absence of real page numbers is also cited as a problem.”

(Via The Apple Blog.)

I understand the frustration.

Reading a textbook or novel as coursework is a different experience than reading for leisure. The Kindle, to me, is a more leisure-time type device.

I bet Amazon will learn from these pilot programs (maybe they will get it right with the Kindle DX 2?) and I truly do commend them for popularizing the e-Textbook/e-Reader market. Prior to the Kindle other e-Reader devices were niche devices; something intriguing but not practical.The Kindle and the Kindle Store changed a lot of that through the integration of wireless downloading and the presence of Kindle books through the Amazon store. The Kindle, and I am sure the devices coming to market now, will set the stage for what will come next in the e-Textbook market.

If Apple truly is working on some sort of Tablet device then they better look at the pitfalls of the Kindle and Kindle DX, in educational settings, and meet the needs of their consumer and educational users by making sure to not let design impact learning.

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