If you read over some reviews of the Kindle e-reader, you’ll find that it has all sorts of amazing features. 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 what about students?
What Students Need
To benefit from an e-reader, students need the ability to do several things:
- Access their textbooks as well as novels.
- Underline and highlight text in those books.
- Make side notes.
- Receive pdfs sent by a teacher via email.
- Underline and highlight pdfs.
- Send and received text they have marked up.
- Search the text of all e-documents at once for research and study purposes.
- Most of all--the ability to afford it all.
The Amazon Kindle does some of the above.
The Problem With the Kindle
In theory, teachers can assign textbooks that students could read on a Kindle, and teachers could even send extra reading assignments. But the cost is preventing educators from using the features. A Kindle costs almost $400, and the ability to download books, to send documents, and to receive them--each activity costs a little bit extra. Even if students could afford to receive books and other assignments, teachers couldn’t afford to send them!
The Future of E-Reading?
For one thing, textbooks would have to become available and affordable through education discounts. Right now, students have to pay anywhere from 20-200 dollars for traditional textbooks. If all textbooks were readily available on e-readers, and if those texts cost were reduced by a very large margin, then the e-reader would be great for students.
There Is Hope
Amazon reports that it plans to offer an updated version of the e-reader that will be designed more specifically for downloading and reading textbooks. That takes care of part of the problem. But in truth, the entire learning culture would/will have to change before we can all take real advantage of e-reader technology.
Bottom Line
The good news is that the Kindle has the ability to do much of what e-readers need to do to make them useful to students. Students can access most novels they need, and some of the textbooks. They can mark up the text of the material they can access and receive pdfs from their teachers. The bad news is that somebody has to pay for the services and the gadgets that students need. For now, the e-reader is not practical for educational purposes.
