Princeton Students Hate The Kindle DX

Bad news for Amazon, who’s hoping that in the future all college students will read their textbooks through the oversized Kindle DX: the first students to use it, at Princeton, are not fans.

Students taking part in the pilot program have all sorts of complaints about the device, mostly centering around the fact that it’s a huge pain to take notes and “interact” with the text. Here’s what student Aaron Horvath has to say about it:

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool. It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate. Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages – not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs. All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.

Yee-ouch! Further complaints include the fact that the lack of concrete page numbers make citing sources a huge pain in the arse and the fact that you need to charge up the battery for it to work. I guess physical textbooks will be around for a while longer, eh? [Daily Princetonian via Engadget]