History professor Jeremi Suri's senior seminar students are luckier than most. All 20 students received a free Kindle for the semester, along with eight course texts.
Kindle, an electronic reader manufactured by book mega-website Amazon, shows signs of being the future of books, for better or worse.
Ken Frazier, director of UW Libraries, purchased the Kindles and e-books for Suri's class using the money of a private fundraiser. Suri described Frazier as ""one of the most forward-looking people in the whole university.""
""We've been teaching the same way for 30-40 years—someone with glasses on lecturing to people,"" Suri said. ""Technology allows the ability to take old wisdom and make it more accessible, exciting and more relevant.""
According to Suri and my own brief contact with one of the rare, Amazonian delights, Kindles are lightweight, easy to use and more fun than a textbook. The screen appears like an actual printed page, not a computer monitor. With no backlighting it's easy on the eyes and energy efficient. Students can even highlight while reading and save highlights in one separate file for efficient studying. Who wouldn't prefer carrying around one Kindle instead of numerous textbooks?
Suri's students did complain that the note-taking function, which requires typing with small keys reminiscent of texting, is time-consuming and frustrating. But Kindle will undoubtedly develop more user-friendly editions as the e-reader becomes more popular.
For those of us who aren't wooed by Kindle's sheer nerd factor, Suri says there are substantial savings involved.
Though initially expensive, Kindles are investments. True, they cost $300, but the price may creep down as more are produced. A one-time Kindle purchase may save students hundreds over the course of four or more years of college. Books that typically cost $35 on Amazon.com cost from $1 to $9 for Kindles, according to Suri. If more textbooks are made Kindle-friendly, the amount saved by buying texts on Kindle could outweigh the cost of the e-reader.
The amount of paper saved by transitioning just some textbooks from print version to Kindle would be astonishing. Not only could it help the environment, but publishers may benefit by the massive reduction in production and distribution costs. Their reduced savings could then be passed along to consumers.
Suri would like to see the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates money spent on teaching professors how to use Kindles and bargaining for cheaper Kindle book prices with publishers. If most UW students had a Kindle, the university could negotiate for cheaper books by volume, Suri said.
Kindles aren't the only e-readers on the market, though they are the most successful. Hopefully similar and superior e-readers will become popular soon so consumers can have real market competition. Steve Jobs, this sounds like your kind of bag.
Despite the benefits, realize Kindles and the like are not all sunshine and honeybees. This July, Amazon deleted several purchased e-books from individual Kindles after discovering publishers had provided Kindle with illegally-obtained copies. Coincidentally, this overextension of power was exercised on e-copies of George Orwell's ""1984"" and ""Animal Farm,"" famous novels on authoritarian control. Even if kind-hearted corporations promise not to replicate such actions in the future, the possibility will always be there, and should become increasingly scary as more and more of our pertinent personal information is moved to the interwebz. Barnes and Noble could not enter a customer's house to silently steal back a purchased book. But what's to prevent Kindle from taking back or even modifying an e-book? The dangers of the electronic era must be remembered as we use technology to simplify our lives.
Douglas Yang, a Kindle-carrying Suri senior seminar student sums up the situation succinctly. ""I think there is no way going around electronic book readers like the Kindle; they are the future, and there's no way we can avoid them.""
Jamie Stark is a sophomore intending to major in journalism and political science. We welcome all feedback. Please send responses to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
