Remember the Atari 800

In the early 1980s when personal computers were just coming out, many colleges took the step in demanding that their incoming students buy a personal computer. They were Coleco Adam, an Atari 800, some Radio Shack models and very few Apples. The IBM PC was just too expensive at the time. Thus on top of a tuition at that time of $12,000 per year the student or their parents had to cough up another $1.500! For those of us who remember the word processor was really just a text editor and spread sheets had yet to be invented.

In the Financial Times, owned by Pearson, which owns massive amounts of academic publishing, and is the main driver in the escalating costs of text books, it says today:

"Textbook publishers Pearson , owner of the Financial Times, Cengage Learning and Wiley are also to offer some books on Kindle. Five universities, including Princeton, have agreed to test the feasibility of the Kindle DX replacing textbooks."

The Christian Science Monitor also reports more broadly:

"Now, imagine for a moment that you’re the parent of a college student. You’ve already shelled out $600 for a laptop and maybe an extra $200 for an iPhone. Are you really going to hand over another $489 for a Kindle?

That’s the problem Kindle faces. But it has to be said that Bezos is approaching it intelligently. Remember, people make the same “it’s too expensive” comments about pretty much every Apple product. The company went gangbusters into the education market and got a generation hooked on Macs and iPods. The rest is, well, the story of Steve Jobs’ bank account.

Along with Case Western, five other universities — Pace, Princeton, Reed, Arizona State, and the University of Virginia — have signed a deal with Amazon and the Kindle DX.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that some students “will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science, and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school’s chief information officer.” The school will then compare the experiences of these Kindle students with those using traditional textbooks."

This sounds like the early 80s again. Today students spend thousands on text books. Little children walk around with back packs filled with weight picture books and they are setting themselves up for back problems latter in life. Pearson in my professional opinion is the major offender of putting more pictures in books and then charging massive amounts. Why does one need a single picture in a calculus book, yet they look like travel guide. History book are loaded with picture commentary and they exceed comic books.

But back to Kindle. Moving all of a students books to a Kindle creates a problem. How do we know that this is the right platform. Second. reading and studying involves many, many books, just look at a library or my office, they are tagged, in piles, and that is still with GB of pdf files of papers and other reference materials. Learning is multimedia like, and Kindle is a single threaded platform that delimits and does not expand. It may get rid of weighty back packs but it creates a linear way of thinking. Linearity have never led to insight, it is the nonlinear thinker who manages to connect the dots.

Thus Princeton may just be Atari 800 redux!