E-Book Readers Bomb on College Campuses

06/10/2010

Hopes were high last fall when the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle DX was distributed to a group of students at seven universities around the country in a classroom pilot program for the electronic reader. With students able to download class materials and textbooks easily onto the slender 10.2-ounce device, many thought the era of carrying heavy textbooks would soon be over. Just a few months later, their hopes were dashed, as students reported that the Kindle was a poor replacement for a textbook, hard to use in the classroom, and difficult to navigate.

"It's an amazing device for recreational reading, but it's not quite ready for prime time in higher education," says Daniel Turner, associate dean of the masters and executive education programs at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business (Foster Full-Time MBA Profile), one of the schools that participated in the pilot.

It appears unlikely that the Amazon Kindle DX will be making a comeback in most college and graduate school classrooms this fall. Over the past few months, results from the pilot programs have trickled in, with most schools reporting that students were dissatisfied with the device as a classroom tool, and that many students had abandoned the Kindle just a few weeks into the experiment. At some schools, more than half the students surveyed said they wouldn't recommend the e-reader to friends for use in the classroom, citing the device's lack of flexibility, slow navigation within readings, and an inadequate file management system. Another problem that loomed over the pilot was the device's inaccessibility to the blind and the visually impaired, due to a complicated menu navigation screen that makes it hard to access the read-aloud feature. Until Amazon addresses these problems, the Kindle is unlikely to be embraced by most of the higher education community, says Tracy Gray, managing director of the National Center for Technology Innovation in Washington.

"This is really emerging technology, and probably in two to three years, these problems will be solved," says Gray. "But right now, makers of e-readers are really just working out the devil in the details."

Not for Case Studies

Of the seven schools that participated in the Kindle pilot, two were business schools, Foster and the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business (Darden Full-Time MBA Profile). Darden worked closely with Amazon to convert many of the case studies it uses in first-year classes to the Kindle format and selected 62 students and 10 faculty for the pilot, says Michael Koenig, Darden's director of MBA operations. While students liked some of the Kindle's features, such as the big screen and the capacity of the digital library to store hundreds of case studies, most students were unhappy overall with the user experience, Koenig says. Although the device allows students to highlight text and make notes, many complained it was difficult to use these features. Perhaps the most pressing problem, he says, was the lack of a folder management structure, which made it hard for students to keep track of the dozens of business cases they needed for class. Concludes Koenig: "When you got to the technical classes, the Kindle just could not keep up."

By the second quarter, most students had abandoned their Kindles, choosing instead to read case studies on their laptop or on paper, Koenig says. In a midterm survey, in which students were asked if they would recommend the Kindle to their fellow students, 86 percent said they wouldn't, while only 12 percent said they would advise friends to use it. Students did like using it for personal reading, however, with 96 percent of the class saying they would recommend it to friends for that purpose.

The pilot program helped Amazon gauge how the Kindle can be a more useful classroom tool, says Stephanie Mantello, a spokeswoman for Amazon. The latest software upgrade for the Kindle includes two larger font sizes, she said. The company is working on an audible menu system to help blind and vision-impaired users navigate, she added. "We will always look at ways of improving the student experience on Kindle," Mantello wrote in an email. "One day students could read all their schoolbooks on Kindle."

By Alison Damast

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