Have you ever actually used a Kindle textbook? There's a bookmark feature that allows you to immediately jump to preselected pages in the book. It's infinitely more useful than having a bunch of stupid physical placeholders in a textbook that you need to jump around with. Also, I can search my textbook. Can you?
Yes, it's called an Index.
The Internet and electronics will turn learning upside down. Let's hope we don't drag our feet.
Emphasis added. Until they do, it's still an issue.
> The Internet and electronics will turn learning upside down. Let's hope we don't drag our feet.
And let's hope that the people developing software to make this revolution possible don't drag their feet either.
Awesome! But in the meantime I'm not going to deal with shitty UI because it might get better. I don't buy anything for my kindle other than things I expect to read cover to cover because it simply is terrible to navigate.
No kidding!
Years back, in college, I hunted around and bought a copy of the textbook required for a course on discreet math. It was small and very expensive. Later I learned that some enterprising students had gotten a copy from the school library and, at $0.10/page, photocopied it (or at least the parts needed) and saved an ass-load of money.
I have no idea if an open-book test would allow for bringing in a stack of photocopied pages, but ...
"You photocopied my book???", and the student was "Yes, that is exactly what I did." Then they had a bit of skirmish.
In the end, the prof backed off -- and that is a good thing. He made us buy his 100$ book and, essentially, do proofreading for him. He was also a visiting prof, so none of this 100$ was going to be recoverable next year...
I really really want to like e-textbooks, but I wouldn't try experiment again without the large-format Kindle, and I just can't justify the massively increased price over the smaller Kindle.
Thanks for pointing that out; I've removed issue 4, because it's really just the product of my tired mind.
Having the entire text searchable is a really big plus. I wish that physical textbooks would start including a digital index, to make it easier to find things in them.
If I need to learn serially from a book rather than merely reference it, I prefer physical texts; I simply find physical textbooks to be more pleasing.
EDIT: removed issue four, because I completely missed that this is an addition to the current kindle system. (Text was "4) Renting. There doesn't seem to be an option to buy the electronic copy and have it forever. I might be unusual in that I'm keeping several of my textbooks that are either directly related to my major or very good, but still.")
On the other hand, there are some classes where I've hardly used the required textbooks, or where I know I'm not going to need to review them, so electronic textbooks could be useful for those. The problem is knowing in advance which classes are which.
(I just checked how much my textbooks for the next semester will cost. Around $700, used. Ouch.)