Should You Buy an E-Reader?

The concept of an e-reader is great: an electronic gadget that can download books and articles from the Internet or from you inbox could save time and save trees! But the fact is, unless you have extra money to play with, the technology just isn’t there yet when it comes to being really useful to students.

I have done my best to find an e-reader that really proves useful for students. So far, every one I’ve found is either too expensive to be practical or it just falls short when it comes to features that students need.

The Amazon Kindle is an impressive piece of equipment. It can store hundreds of books, it looks fantastic, it’s friendly on the eyes, it enables you to access your favorite newspapers and blogs, and it sports some easy-to-use controls. That’s all good for avid leisure readers. But, for the money, it just doesn’t do what students and teachers need an e-reader to do.

Before e-readers become a worthwhile purchase for students, they will have to enable students to:

• Access their textbooks as well as novels at an affordable cost.
• Underline and highlight text in those books.
• Make side notes.
• Receive pdfs sent by a teacher via email.
• Underline and highlight pdfs.
• Interact with Microsoft Word.
• Send and received text they have marked up.
• Search the text of all e-documents at once for research and study purposes.

The Amazon Kindle fills a lot of the necessary criteria, but not all. And at nearly $400 a unit, who can afford a product that almost delivers?