e-Textbooks and the Amazon Kindle
Kindle DX via engadget.com
This morning, I was forwarded a query from a Cornell undergraduate, noting the impending announcement tomorrow of a new, larger screen Amazon Kindle and linking to a Wall Street Journal story on its potential use as an electronic textbook. He suggested that Cornell should consider signing up as one of the universities making this device available to their students. I thought that my reply might be broadly interesting, so here is a slightly revised and expanded version.
This is an area of very active development and of great interest for the Cornell University Library and Cornell as a whole. In addition to the larger Amazon Kindle, expected to be announced tomorrow, active competitors in this area include the Sony e-Reader, Plastic Logic , and potentially a larger tablet-style iPhone/iPod. At this point, it is not clear which devices are most likely to succeed both as valuable options for students and faculty and in the marketplace.
When the Library recently reviewed the e-Textbook issue, we had the following concerns with currently available devices:
1) More and more textbooks are using color illustrations. The e-Ink technology used by the Kindle and others will eventually be able to display color, but it’s likely still a ways off. Ideally, the devices should also support animations, videos, and other A/V content. Again, the expectation is that e-Ink refresh rates will increase, but they’re not very fast now.
2) Licensing issues and availability: Textbooks come from a wide range of publishers. Amazon has done well at licensing popular books for the Kindle, but available titles are still a small fraction of the total books available. At this point, it’s not clear which textbooks will be available on the Kindle. There are also concerns about the openness of the Kindle, and its ability to deal with non-Amazon materials (for example, some of the new open textbook initiatives such as http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/). Tim O’Reilly discussed the openness issue in a Forbes article.
3) Digital rights management: Unlike a physical textbook, used eBooks typically cannot be transferred to other devices. This means that students can’t recoup costs by selling books at the end of the semester, and can’t save money by purchasing a used text. It’s possible that the pricing will reflect this, but it’s certainly not clear at this point that it will.
In the long term, I believe that e-Textbooks will make sense economically, practically, and academically. After a decade of false starts (I still have both a SoftBook and a Rocket eBook lying around somewhere), we’re getting very close to a tipping point. The constant network connectivity of the Kindle, and the availability of the Kindle iPhone app, make it a very strong contender, but the field is still open.
Once the new Kindle is announced and the details are clear, we will certainly look into whether a pilot project here at Cornell might make sense. The Library is constantly reviewing and discussing the opportunities in e-Textbooks, e-Books, and mobile devices. I’ve posted on related issues previously on this blog, both on Mobile Devices and CUL and on eBooks Heat Up.
Since my reply to the student this morning, ReadWriteWeb has posted some similar questions and observations: Would Students Even Want a Kindle for Textbooks?. In addition to some of the issues above, they also point out that students already have laptops, which provide most of the network, storage, and display capabilities to handle e-Textbooks. The Library also considered this earlier, but I believe (and it’s echoed in the ReadWriteWeb article comments) that the “closed garden” aspect of devices like the Kindle and iPhone make it a much more comfortable place for publishers. It’s hard to say whether or not the Kindle will cross the threshold for students to haul around yet another expensive electronic device.
I’ll plan to post an update on the Kindle DX tomorrow if the actual news raises any other significant issues.
The biggest problem is with eTextbooks getting the books on the Kindles.
The professors can scan their books and attach DRM to these PDFs so they will not be available for viewing after the semester ends. I think this will be the best solution for students and teachers. However, publishers are cut out of the loop, so there is going to be some legal resistance there.
Realistically, I don’t see Cornell adopting Kindles for at least a year. A lot of publishers do not have agreements with Amazon, so it would be difficult to have them available in the immediate future. We will have classes where half of the books are available electronically and the other half not, which defeats the purpose of having a kindle since one of its goals is to be a cost efficient device.
Education is a lucrative and stable business. The end costs of educational material is not going down, so we might as well wait and let amazon iron out all the little problems with the current generation of kindles (no color, poor diagram display, lack of advanced symbol support) and give the professors a couple of years to upload all of their material online.