The kindle and academics: the kindle for traveling, the website for discovery
by Alex
I bought a kindle. I dropped US$400 on a device to let me read books when I already own a tremendous amount of books that I will never get to. Why? And, is kindle any good for professors like me?
I bought a kindle because I live in Honolulu and I go to the mainland (or farther away) two or three times a year) and each time I take 5-10 kilos of books with me because of 1) my bizarre need to read constantly 2) I read non-fiction which comes in larger sizes than the normal paperback 3) as an American I constantly need to feel I have a ‘choice’ about things, including what I read. Most importantly, I’ll be traveling to Papua New Guinea, living there for 2 months, and coming back this summer and will need a lot to read. So even though I am not a gadget person these travelling needs pushed me over the edge of a decision I would not normally have made. My bags just got much _much_ lighter which really _really_ matters to me.
Professors, or at least social scientists like me, have very particular reading needs. We read the way athletes work out, and for all kinds of reasons — we read specialized literature for our research, we read popular and general pieces with an eye towards teaching them, we read for pleasure (actually I don’t read for pleasure that much, but when I travel I do). How well does the kindle handle our specialized needs?
Most of the Kindle is Amazon website. Before I bought a kindle, I used Amazon.com constantly for my scholarly work as a ‘discovery’ or ‘awareness’ tool — the website helps you discover books by understanding your preferences, making recommendations about similar books, and providing access to lists that others have written that can be used as the basis for further browsing. It also helps you filter these books and decide which I want to read, why, and how badly. It does so by providing metadata that quickly helps you judge the books (date, publisher, author and author bio) as well as the ability to quickly scan the table of contents (I rarely get to the point where I need to read an excerpt). It also allows you to organize and store your discoveries via various arrangements of your shopping cart, lists, wishlists, and so forth.
Almost all of these features are missing from the Kindle shop. The product details (year, publisher) are still there (and, alas, you still have to scroll down to see them), the recommendations are there, and the listamania lists are around (but much scarcer) and may perhaps grow in time. But there is no quick and obvious way to save kindle editions of books to a wishlist, or to take a look at their tables of content — instead you have to download the free sample or switch to the Amazon paper bookstore, check out the TOC, toggle back over the kindle bookstore, and then keep browsing. This is a big pain.
Paper books are available in many different versions and at many different prices while kindle books normally are not (tho, to be sure, there are multiple editions of public domain texts). Therefore a good way to sort them would be by price — by saying you want to spend more than US$2 and less than US$20 you essentially not only find books in your price point, you are also categorizing books by date since the numerous (and often irrelevant) public domain books get filtered out. Except, of course, that Amazon does not allow you to search in this way.
The best tip for searching I can give so far is to search for the name of a press (University of California, e.g.) and then expand the nested menu on the left hand side of the screen to search through their inventory.
At any rate, all of this applies solely to the kindle website when viewed on a browser on your computer. The version of it you get on the kindle itself is really inadequate as a research tool, and so far I’ve found impossible to browse effectively in any serious way. I know that Amazon is out to serve the ‘serious reader’ rather than the professional one, but if I was looking to further adoption amongst academics I’d seriously work on making the kindle section of the website look and feel more like the rest of the website, and get the on-device store more usable.
Actually, I love the Kindle, probably because I do a lot of leisure reading. Your article was mostly about searching the Kindle store, and I want to add a couple of comments about the Kindle. As far as using the Kindle in an academic fashion there are two major drawbacks. First, there are few academic publishers that are publishing for kindle — your choice of academic books is rather small. This is particularly disappointing concerning textbooks. The lower prices for books combined with the ease of carrying them are a natural for students who might prefer not to lug a set of books about in their backpacks. Secondly, and more importantly for the academic, there are no bookmarks. You cannot easily know what page (of the print version) the passage you are reading is from. This makes citing anything you read on the kindle difficult. You need to either cite the Kindle version (not really acceptable yet), look up the passage in a paper version, or look it up using a utility like GoogleBook. So I have not really been using the Kindle for academic work, but it is very addicting and fun for other stuff.
Correction:
In my previous comment, I inadvertently said that there were no bookmarks. I meant to say that there are no page numbers.
I was considering getting one of these as well, though not because I read but rather just want it as a gadget. It is interesting to see some of the UI issues they still have to overcome.
It works well for what it is supposed to do — let you store and read a whole library of mystery novels on one device. As much as I like it, I still think it is really for very ambitious early adopters at this point, or people whose needs are right smack dab in the center of what the kindle is designed to do. Word is that they will have a new version out at the end of this year and I think that will be the one the normal early adopters/gadget heads will want to pick up. The rev after that will probably be the one that normal gadget heads will want. Although at that point phones and books might be merging in wierd ways I can’t imagine at the moment. I think Amazon is really smart in the way they’ve designed the product and brought it to market anyway, even if this is still early on in the game.
Alex, I’m dying to know what you think of this: http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/21/new-yorker-jared-diamond-business-media-new-yorker.html?feed=rss_popstories
thanks
I have been reading Kindle books on my iPhone. It is great because here in Taiwan it is very slow and expensive to get books shipped over. Although it seems academic publishers are pretty stingy about releasing books on Kindle, I am quite happy reading these books on my iPhone, and the free sample chapter feature is very nice, since it actually means I buy less books, as I don’t buy the book until I’ve actually read the sample.
I actually considered buying a Kindle, but decided against it. The main reason for me to get an e-book, as opposed to the iPhone, would be to read PDF documents, which don’t display well on an iPhone since the text can’t be reformatted to fit the small screen. However, the Kindle does not support PDFs directly (I think there is some way they will convert them for you). Since so much of what I read is on PDF this is a real shame. For this reason I’m thinking about getting the eSlick reader when it comes out, as it is built around PDF documents.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/
Phones and books almost intersected in weird ways for one brief shining movement. Before ‘smart phones,’ there were the first PDAs. These were even smaller than the Kindle, also included the ability to bookmark and search, in addition to holding all of your contacts, appointments, etc. Since I was adjuncting at 2 different places, this was very handy. But the phone was separate.
I loved my PDA so much. It was especially handy when I had back surgery and had to lie flat on my back (or stand up) for weeks. Ever try reading when you have to lie down? Yep, arms get pretty tired. I read 10s and 10s of books on my little PDA. And then, I used it so much it died. And I could not replace it because ‘smart phones’ had taken over all the functions EXCEPT having MS Reader or a version of Adobe Reader that was suited to the small screen.
My little laptop sort of fills this function (and with Adobe Digital Editions, I can make some notes in the bookmarks, although mostly I just flip to Evernote), but I won’t be able to hold it above my head easily when next I recover from surgery. Sigh, I’ll be reduced to watching TV while I recover.