Princeton unveils Amazon Kindle DX plan

Princeton University in New Jersey has revealed details of its e-textbook programme using Amazon’s new 9.7-inch Kindle DX reader.

Under the pilot, the reading materials for three courses due to start in the autumn will be loaded on Kindle DX devices. Participating students and faculty members in the selected courses will receive a free DX that they will be allowed to keep.

The $30,000 (£20,000) cost of the project is being met by a sustainability fund, and its aim is to reduce the number of pages printed throughout the University.

Paper chase

Internal statistics show that students are not reading digital articles and book selections on their computer screens, but rather downloading and printing the same files again and again, in the course of a semester.

Last year, Princeton printed 50 million sheets of paper at the cost of $5 million (£3.3 million) and 25,000 trees. If e-readers can cut down that printing by 1 per cent, Princeton will have more than made up for what was spent on this pilot.

At the end of the pilot project, Princeton will assess what effects the readers have had on reducing printing and on teaching and learning in the selected courses. The results will be made public.

Princeton is one of six American colleges and universities participating in the project, joining Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Reed College and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.

If I may inject a view from the American side of the pond, Tholmewood has the right of it on his evaluation of the Princeton testing. Other marketing ideas which have been advanced for this device, such as using the technology to revive the dying U.S. daily newspapers will not work. But I see promise for the technology in other directions, and I have ordered a Kindle DX. I am a researcher and writer, principally in military history and related subjects, and I can see great value in this portable, lightweight technology in my field, and I think there are others including medicine and engineering. The earlier versions of the kINDLE were fine for “amusement” reading, but with a built-in PDF reader and the increase in size, the Kindle DX will become the first real generation in a technological leap forward. It takes guts to invest in new technology these days, and no one should criticize Amazon for hedging its bets a bit by looking for others to share the developmental risk with them. This kind of entrepreneural risk-taking was truly the mother of invention in the wonderful day of capitalist derring-do before our countries lapsed into the limp-wristed socialist prostitution that seems to prevail today, by and large. Go Jeff Bezos and Amazon!