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In Support of Digital Book Readers

March 11th, 2008 | View Comments

TidBITS lobbies Steve Jobs for an improved e-book reader (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan). I’ve seen the the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader Digital Book and I semi-covet both, particularly for the easy-on-the-eyes display.

Most of the talk about digital readers has been for the regular book market, but I think there’s an entirely different market that would embrace digital readers with open arms, but have slightly different needs than your average fiction consumer.

Students.

We students read reams and reams of journal articles. In fact, almost all of my upper-level courses have only had “coursepacks”—binders full of articles and other materials—and no regular textbooks. We march faithfully to the professor’s chosen copy center, fork over anywhere from $12 to $50, and walk away with several pounds of photocopies. This could all be digitized. Heck, textbooks could be digitized too. Save time, save trees.

What I would like, as a student, is some device that combines the advantages of reading journal articles on paper—ability to highlight and make notes in the margins—with not having to lug around and/or file giant reams of paper. Less eyestrain, less back strain.

I would like to be able to load my own pdfs and other files onto the device. I would like some way of telling the device how the pdf is formatted—one page per sheet or two.

I would like a stylus, so I can write notes right on the document and have them saved.

I would like some sort of organization system so I can tag articles with keywords. Some way of indexing favorite quotes or key data would be great, too.

I would like some internet access with a standard browser so I can log into the library system or a course web site and download new articles straight to the device.

Basically, some kind of souped-up laptop-meets-Kindle-meets-Endnote-meets PDA sort of thing. What say you, Apple?

Tags: book, books, college, college life, e-book readers, e-books, readers, reading, school, students, textbooks

Yvonne posted this on March 11th, 2008 @ 5:39pm in Graduate School, Life | Permalink to "In Support of Digital Book Readers"

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