Ellington

Aditya Sankar has had an off-again, on-again relationship with his Kindle. He is one of the UW Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) graduate students who participated in the pilot test for Amazon’s electronic reader at the UW, and like many of his peers, he found benefits and disadvantages to using the device in a classroom setting.

“Initially, when I got it, it was exciting because I like devices,” he said. “It was exciting in the sense that it was novel. Once the novelty wore off, there were a few issues that dissuaded me from using it.”

The Kindle went through a pilot test at seven universities across the nation to see how students would react to the product as a tool for school. The CSE Department handed out 42 Kindles this year to the department’s graduate students as part of the trial program.

The students were allowed to keep the Kindles for free as long as they responded with feedback to Amazon about what they thought of the product. The goal of the pilot program was to find out what it was that students liked, and, more importantly, what they disliked about the Kindle.

Overall, the responses of CSE graduate students highlighted just how often students take for granted the layout and effectiveness of regular, physical textbooks.

“Comparing it to textbooks, it kind of sucks,” CSE graduate student Ryder Ziola said. “Mostly the problem is that you don’t have any sort of physical clues about what a book is like. There are a lot of things it is good at, if you are reading a novel, where you consume in a linear fashion. It’s really good at stuff [like] that, but when it comes to actual textbooks, it’s a failure.”

Edward Lazowska, the Bill and Melinda Gates chair of the CSE department, also said that reading textbooks with the device has proven to be problematic.

“It’s a fantastic personal pleasure-reading device, but textbook reading is different,” Lazowska said. “You want to take notes, and Kindle needs some adaptation for that.”

Most CSE students agreed that taking notes on the Kindle paled in comparison to the effectiveness of laptop Word documents or a basic pen and paper setup.

“I am used to making notes on the side, which is impossible to do in PDFs,” Sankar said. “In the format of Kindle, you have to use the dinky keyboard. Plus, it’s painful copying files to it; I have to pull out the cable to do so.”

Many students in the graduate program noted this drawback of the Kindle and rated it as an important and necessary improvement that needed to be made. The Kindle has highlighting capabilities, but the keypad itself has buttons that are less than half a centimeter in diameter, making note-taking difficult and slow.

Another frustration with the Kindle is its inability to zoom in on PDFs, which comprise a majority of CSE graduate reading material.

At the same time, the Kindle DX has a larger screen that is more friendly for reading than laptop screens. It is 9.7 inches and has an auto-rotating feature to allow readers to view text in both portrait and landscape views. Also, downloading books takes fewer than 60 seconds, with the Kindle’s 3G wireless connection.

“I got it for convenience,” said Andrew McKenna, a student who owns the device for pleasure reading. “The books can be downloaded in 30 seconds. You look up a book, it says if it has a Kindle edition, and you can download it to your computer, e-mail, or download it wirelessly.”

The Kindles that were provided already had downloaded textbooks for introductory graduate courses. Students were also able to scan or download PDFs to read on the Kindle.

Lazowska estimates that graduate students in the program have to print out at least 1,000 pages of research papers in a year. This saved students the time and money involved in printing and allowed them to have the material easily accessible on their Kindles. However, maneuvering through the pages proved difficult for some students.

“It’s a little klutzy to … go back and forth,” Lazowska said. “You are not able to have back and forward rapid access.”

The Kindle weighs 10.3 ounces, and according to Amazon, the battery life is two weeks without turning on the wireless connection. With wireless, the battery life is reported to be seven days.

“There are a lot of shortcomings in terms of what you can do with the Kindles, and I know some people who don’t use them at all because of those, but for me, at least, it’s been useful for what its purpose is,” CSE graduate student Adrian Sampson said. “In general, the best thing about it is that it’s a lot easier to look at than a computer screen.”

Other students note that, when it comes to anything beyond reading, the Kindle lacks capability.

“It’s not replacinwg anything; I don’t think it ever can,” CSE graduate student Andrew Hunter said. “You cannot write code or papers or produce something on the Kindle. I still have to have the ability of doing these things on the computer.”

Amazon has now finished with the pilot test and is working on the improvements suggested by students.

Reach reporter Evelyne Kolker at news@dailyuw.com.