Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

Here are some more random ‘kindle for professors’ thoughts:

1) PDF/DOC display and conversion…: A major plus. I’ve tried fooling around just a bit with reading PDFs and .doc files on the kindle and it works really well, so far — which means that the kindle can be used to read journal articles and long pieces (i.e. dissertations and theses you are advising) without dragging around tons of paper. This is nice for advising, or just for reading papers for a conference while you are on the plane to the conference. One of the things I was most hesitant about when it came to the Kindle’s functionality was how well it handled PDF conversion — I’m glad to say that it seems to do a very good job.

2) …Except for figures. Minor negative (for me) — the screen is too small to view figures, charts, maps, kinship diagrams, etc. and I can’t find a way to zoom in on just a part of them. This is not a big issue for me because I deal mostly in text. But if you work in a quantitative-heavy field and your data is being displayed in tables and such the kindle is not for you.

3) No analog hole: Major, major negative. Although it is easy to get stuff onto your kindle it is difficult to get it off. Physical books can be xeroxed, the xeroxes can be digitized and then distributed as PDFs to students, colleagues etc. (under fair use rights, of course). Those kindle books are cheap for a reason: they lack all of this utility. Of course you can always buy a book to read in kindle format and then go to the library to find an analog copy but even this is a huge pain compared to having the physical book. Perhaps in the future there will be some iTunes-like pricing for no-DRM in-copyright works but… I’m not holding my breath.

4) The affordances of paper and the affordances of kindle: Mixed. Paper books have many affordances which make them great to use (you’ll never remember which side of the page a passage is on when reading a kindle) and scholarly apparatus has been developed with books in mind. For serious scholarly reading paper books completely and utterly destroy the kindle’s pathetic bundle of affordances. Marking up your kindle documents with underlining, marginalia, dogearing the pages — either impossible or impossibly inconvenient. Even flipping back and forth between bibliography, index, endnotes, and what have you is a hopeless cause on the kindle .

To me this means the kindle is not a device that is designed for serious scholarly reading. Strangely, however, having a place in which you are forced to read casually is also strangely liberating. Even casual nonfiction gets at least some rough underlining from me to help me find my way through the contents when the volume lacks a detailed table of contents, index, or running headers, etc. Being forced to read at a shallow level, and not having to worry about reading in a place where you will be able to hold the book so as to underline it, or without having to even find a pencil, has actually increased the amount I read by forcing me to read avocationally.

Another plus with the kindle is instant delivery of contents. When you live in Hawai’i, as I do, the time it takes to get something shipped out to you from the mainland (and the cost it takes to get it shipped really quickly) really is a concern when you are working on a paper which requires materials that the local library doesn’t have. And, lets face it, with books available instantly, even if I lived down the street from The Strand I’d still become totally hooked on instant delivery. In way instant delivery enables impulse purchases and the crippling, information-omnivore ‘browsed everything and read nothing’ tendencies of Internet scholarship. But there are times when you know you _must_ read a book that has come out and that you can either buy it for US$15 and have it now or wait a month for the university press which claims the book is now ‘published’ to ship it to Amazon to ship it to you.

Like many intellectuals I take pleasure in collecting books and having a shelf-full of volumes that reflect my own scholarly makeup. But in Hawai’i or other places with little space, and in a world where rare finds in bookstores are memories of a pre-Abe.com day, it really is nice to know that you can purchase and read a six hundred page history of the reformation without having it further lower the oxygen-paper ratio in your apartment.

Of course the major reason I don’t just sell those books when I am done with them is because I have underlined them and can find quotes and facts in them that I would never locate if I pulled a 600 page book out of the stacks and tried to remember where that weird quote that I wanted was buried away in the depths of the book.

I guess what I am trying to say is that the kindle makes it difficult for you to add value to your book. And that the strict set of usages it encourages and discourages help make you conscious of the different kinds of reading academics do, because it only allows certain sorts.

Last random thought on features: when I can get academic journals delivered to the kindle via some combination of my university proxy and RSS feeds, then I will know the kindle has arisen to conquer us all.