Remember that pilot program for the Kindle DX? Yeah, that thing at Princeton where Amazon subsidized some of the cost of a Kindle DX for a small group of students and Princeton paid the rest. Despite the early rutting from everyone involved, it looks like the Princeton side of the deal is none too happy. One student is so displeased with the device that he called it a “poor excuse of an academic tool.” Snap!

The e-readers have been in student hands for two weeks across three classes. The Daily Princetonian claims many students are “dissatisfied and uncomfortable” with the Kindle DX. Most students cite the lackluster annotation features, though a lack of page numbers has also proven a bit of a setback. One professor added concerns for transitioning from physical to digital forms. His own texts are riddled with highlights and scribbles for noteworthy passages. Transferring those notes to the Kindle would take days.

Despite the inconvenience, students have not yet decided to opt out of the pilot program.

Alongside the Kindle DX announcement, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled plans to partner with several post-secondary schools to get the DX into students’ hands. Included in the schools are Bezos’ own Princeton and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.

Both schools will be giving a Kindle DX to a select group of students, subsidizing a portion of the cost while Amazon picks up the rest. In a flurry of Ivy-league snobbery, Princeton was quick to call their program unique because it focused on using the Kindle as a form of sustainability. Wait, you mean the Princeton Kindles don’t use paper?!? That’s so GREAT! It really warms my eco-friendly heart to hear someone using the Kindle in super innovative ways.

With Amazon’s announcement of the Kindle DX, sites like Wired have been polling students to see just how successful the device might be. Turns out, not too many people are turned on.

For starters, the device comes in at a hefty $500, a price that makes schlepping twenty pounds of books to class seem reasonable. And once you’ve paid for the device, how much is each title going to cost? And what of reselling options? College students are crafty, thrifty buggers who would sooner share a textbook between five people than part with precious beer money.

If cost of ownership wasn’t a glaring enough problem, there’s still the functionality of the device. As one student said, everyone has a laptop now. Why carry two devices? And what if someone needs to borrow your textbook. Do you loan them your $500 DX? And isn’t old tech like a highlighter or a pen working faster for note taking than the DX’s sluggish input system? And, and, and, and, and?

All of these questions are simply answered by tech strategist Michael Gartenberg.

You can’t introduce technology like this, which has got a lot of breakthrough things associated with it, and expect it to be business as usual. The reason the iPod worked was not only did it introduce new technology, but it introduced a new business model for the technology as well.

For now, everyone is still comparing the Kindle to the old medium, books. It now falls to Amazon to make the $9.8 billion textbook industry rethink their methods of distribution and publication to make this device truly viable. If Amazon can keep themselves from getting too greedy, they just might pull this thing off.

Source: Wired