• Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Good places to start

Memoirs of a SLACer

sociological views on life and the liberal arts

Feeds:
Posts
Comments
« Approved
I’ve got a hood but I’m not a doctor* »

The beginning of the end for textbooks

May 8, 2009 by John

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:

Sleep AidSeriously, 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.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • More
  • Email
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Related

Posted in Teaching Tricks, The Electronic Age | Tagged Bentley, College Students, Kindle 2, Kindle DX, Macionis, Sleep Aid, Textbooks | 2 Comments

2 Responses

  1. on January 27, 2010 at 8:16 pm The future is here but it isn’t quite as cool as I had hoped « Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] e-book readers (and their competition) in the past, and I hope to see the day that textbooks are digitized.  Today, Apple unveiled what they surely hope will carry students further down that road, the iPad […]


  2. on November 18, 2014 at 8:07 pm Digitizing my workload: Thoughts on the iPad Air 2 | Memoirs of a SLACer

    […] that it has been nearly five years since the original iPad was announced. Despite the promise I saw for students, I’ve also been fairly cynical over the years about the viability of tablets and e-readers […]



Comments are closed.

  • Pages

    • About
    • Contact
    • Good places to start
  • Previous Posts

    May 2009
    M T W T F S S
     123
    45678910
    11121314151617
    18192021222324
    25262728293031
    « Apr   Jun »
  • Categories

  • Blogs I Read

    • Conditionally Accepted
    • Crooked Timber
    • Female Science Professor
    • Historiann
    • orgtheory.net
    • scatterplot
    • Small Pond Science
    • Soc'ing Out Loud
    • Sociology in Focus
    • Sociology Source
    • Sociology Toolbox
    • Tenured Radical
    • The Society Pages
    • whatisthewhat
  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

  • Meta

    • Register
    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.com
  • Site Meter

    Site Meter

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

WPThemes.


Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Memoirs of a SLACer
    • Join 117 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Memoirs of a SLACer
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Copy shortlink
    • Report this content
    • View post in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: