Kindle DX: Harbinger of the E-Textbook?
First off, let me just say that I love Amazon. Give me some Prime free 2-day shipping and some low prices and I’m on a shopping spree. This is a company that’s been innovative from the outset: from online bookstore to online megastore to purveyor of the first arguably usable e-book reading device – the Kindle. Now, poised for release to the literary masses on June 10th, the Kindle DX promises to deliver 9.7 inches of full-page grayscale glory to e-book fanatics and gadget lovers alike.
So, this begs a question from the geeky law student in me: will I be able to use a Kindle DX to download and read casebooks, treatises, hornbooks and study guides sometime before I graduate from law school in 2011?
The Kindle provides several features that would be useful to law students studying case materials, such as highlighting and annotations. However, there remain a number of unanswered questions:
- How portable will textbook content really be? The format of current e-books is proprietary, and despite the new built-in PDF engine, it’s unlikely that textbook publishers will release content in PDF.
- What about multicolor highlighting? Despite it’s 16 shades of awesome grayness, the Kindle still could not support a law student’s need for the multiple streams of thought woven throughout a case analysis.
- How robust is the annotation feature? We’re all constantly building outlines in our heads in some way or another – will the Kindle’s annotative ability leave us flat and unorganized?
- Is the form factor durable? I’ve seen some pretty beat up casebooks in my short two years as a law student; I wonder if the Kindle would survive the trial that is our backpacks.
All this aside, the Kindle has been generally available for nearly two years, and it seems to me that there are very few (if any) traditional textbooks available for download to the device. Casebook and other legal content publishers have so far been unwilling to digitize their products to any format. It seems even more unlikely that they would embrace a new sales channel that gives Amazon a percentage of their profit off the top.
The Law Profs have made their predictions. Unfortunately, I too believe that the prognosis is negative: I hope the release of the DX will breathe some life into the textbook digitization effort, but I’m not holding my breath…
UPDATE (via Law School Innovation 7/14/2009): Looks like PLI will be offering its legal practice books on the Kindle. Perhaps I spoke too soon?
UPDATE (10/17/2009): West has released some titles electronically. Check out my quick post about it.
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[...] Geekery has some musings about the potential benefits and challenges of the Kindle DX, Amazon’s newer, bigger ebook [...]
I don’t know — I’m a bit more optimistic. When I do use hornbooks, I generally buy them in an eBook format. As publishers get younger and realize this is what our generation wants, I’m sure they’ll adapt once it becomes obvious that it’s a cost-effective solution.
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I know one fellow law student who has one of the first generation Kindles, and he made a go of downloading the cases from Westlaw as .pdfs and then reading them on his Kindle, but that didn’t last too long. I guess it could only read the .pdfs through a workaround and the display was all jacked up. This might be a better alternative…
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Joshua Auriemma Reply:
June 9th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
That had actually been my plan too, but I thought I might burn out real fast not having the excerpts.
Now that I think about it, this would be a great post in conjunction with Adam’s recent eBook post, but I’m too much of an SEO nutjob to let him repost it here.
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Jon Bartelson Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 11:45 am
It’s tough for me to justify the expense unless I can keep all of my materials together on the device. I suppose I could download cases from Westlaw if the casebook I’m using just compiles them anyways, but if there’s analysis in the casebook I would want it all easily accessible from the single device. I really don’t want to have to carry around the textbooks _and_ the Kindle…
Here’s hoping my prediction is wrong. This is one case where I would welcome it :)
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I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to use the Kindle DX as a Law Student. I scan my casebooks and convert the text to audio to help overcome my learning disabilities. It wouldn’t require additional work to put the book on the Kindle.
Nevertheless, I still worry about using the Kindle in the classroom. If I am called on, will I be able to quickly flip through the pages? I envision my professor calling on me and getting frustrated when I struggle to find an answer in the case.
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