If you’ve ever had to buy books for a high school or college class and cringed at the price tag, there is a new pilot program at a select few American colleges and universities that may be of interest to you.
This program, which includes such big names as Princeton, the University of Virginia, Arizona State University, and Reed College, among others, intends to test the use of the Amazon Kindle for class books and textbooks. Students must pay to download the ‘e-books’ – electronic copies of the text that can be viewed on the Kindle – but pay no fee for the Kindle DX, and can keep the device if they participate in the evaluation at the program’s completion.
The program, which intends to evaluate the usefulness of the Kindle in a class setting, is only a temporary trial and not a permanent integration of the technology. The reduced prices for textbooks, instant download ‘delivery,’ and the space saved by not owning textbooks are certainly pluses, but the Kindle also has its drawbacks. Some end users claim it is harder to find material in the Kindle than in a bound textbook, despite the platform’s search function. Also, although e-book versions of textbooks cost much less than bound versions, owning an e-book also prevents re-sale of books after their use in a semester- or year-long class, which certainly affects how much money is actually saved.
Some proponents of the new program claim that Kindles or other e-book readers will become widespread in class settings within the next few years. Others doubt that this use of the reader will really take off, and both sides seem to agree that e-books will never completely replace bound textbooks.
Will the Amazon Kindle’s pilot program be a success? Can e-books successfully replace printed and bound textbooks? Should they?

by Thomas Grant

If you’ve ever had to buy books for a high school or college class and cringed at the exorbitant price tags, there is a new pilot program at a select few American colleges and universities that may be of interest to you.

The Amazon Kindle (ShakataGanai- Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License)

The Amazon Kindle (ShakataGanai- Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License)

This program, which includes such big names as Princeton University, the University of Virginia, Arizona State University, and Reed College, among others, intends to test the use of the Amazon Kindle e-book reader for class books and textbooks. Students must pay to download the e-books – electronic copies of the text that can be viewed on the Kindle – but pay no fee for the Kindle DX hardware, and can keep the device if they participate in the evaluation at the program’s completion.

The program, which intends to evaluate the usefulness of the Kindle in a class setting, is only a temporary trial and not a permanent integration of the technology. The reduced prices for textbooks, instant download ‘delivery,’ and the space saved by not owning textbooks are certainly pluses, but the Kindle also has its drawbacks. Some end users claim it is harder to find material in the Kindle than in a bound textbook, despite the platform’s search function. Also, although e-book versions of textbooks cost much less than bound versions, owning an e-book also prevents re-sale of books after their use in a semester- or year-long class, which certainly affects how much money is actually saved.

Some proponents of the new program claim that Kindles or other e-book readers will become widespread in class settings within the next few years. Others doubt that this use of the reader will really take off, and both sides seem to agree that e-books will never completely replace bound textbooks. So here are the questions for you:

Will the Amazon Kindle’s pilot program be a success? Can e-books successfully replace printed and bound textbooks? Should they?

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