The Amazon Kindle has made the jump to academia, signing deals with several textbook publishers to make their materials available via the electronic device.
It's limited to college at the moment, but when you look at how quickly Kindle has spread (from its introduction in 2007 to its move into institutions of learning in 2009), I can't imagine it will be long before the paper bag covered textbooks are a thing of the past.
Pretty soon, our kids could be book-free.
At least books-as-we-once-knew-them free.
Don't believe me? I remember the kids in my classes in elementary and high school whose only exposure to books were the texts they hauled in their backpacks (or, just as likely, left in their lockers).
Frankly, I'm a self-described Internet addict, and yet, I always return to books at the end of the day, to physical paper volumes. I can get my news on the 'net, do my work on the 'net, even listen to my music and watch my tv on a computer. But I need a real live book to slip off and escape into the written word. Maybe I'm just an old fuddy duddy.
I can see the advantages - portability for one (no more aching backs from those overpacked bookbags), the ease of updating a school's resources as information changes (instead of making do, as we did, with textbooks marked with our parents' names at the front, read out to us by our parents' old football coaches) for another. Whether a cost savings could be realized, I don't know (do you weigh the damage to one book by a student against the damage to a machine carrying many books?).
And not having to craft one more paper bag bookcover? Priceless.
Still, I may cry the day my daughter comes home with all her homework shoved away in her pocket. And the Kindle 2 - or some other player that "reads" the books aloud to them? Uh uh, no way, no how. She may be living in "the future" we dreamed about when we were kids, but she's still got to do the work herself.
Image: Amazon
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