I’ve never been too excited about using textbooks in the courses I teach, but I think that a case can be made for their existence:
Seriously, though, there are times when you want your students to have access to a comprehensive overview of the knowledge in a field or subfield. Of course, textbooks are heavy to carry around campus and cost a lot (maybe too much – I hear this guy drives a Bentley). Enter the newest member of the Kindle family, the Kindle DX:
The Kindle DX has a 9.7″ screen, allowing it to display pages comparable in size to a traditional textbook. One of the images on Amazon’s sales page indicates that college students are a target audience.
I don’t think that this is going to cause an immediate revolution in textbook sales, but I hope that future versions with color screens (and maybe even touch-sensitivity so that readers could take notes on the screen) will allow textbooks to become more reasonably priced and much more portable.
See Inside Higher Ed for a more detailed description of Amazon’s deals with three major textbook publishers and trials at six colleges.
Memoirs of a SLACer 