So far, professors and students who wanted to save on their printing whilst not hurting their eyes reading from monitors all day had two options, one high end and the other low end. The high end one involved dishing out a whoping for an IREX 1000, which comes with an extra large 10.2 inch display. Great for those bigger Pdfs and a very nice design, but the target audience was really business professionals. Very hard to convince my students to put more money into what is in the end just a spin on a technology that has been around for thousands of years than most would put in their laptop (although arguably they would save money on the long run). The low end alternative was to go for one of the now many mass-market ebook readers. The problem with those is that they are really made with paperbacks in mind, not academic books, textbooks or articles. Reducing these to show on a 6 inch screen (as in the Kindle) made for very cramped reading.
It now seems that at last a new generation of ebook readers is about to emerge that targets among others this huge intermediary academic market. Both Irex's DR 800 and Plastic Logic's QUE have considerable promise. The QUE has an 8.5 x 11 inch screen, whilst the DR800 boast an 8.1 diagonal. The QUE has a gesture based interface, whilst the DR800 works with a stylus. Both are clearly Pdf friendly, and based on open platforms. Both
have wired and wireless capability. The QUE is scheduled to premiere in Vegas on January 2010, whilst the DR800 should be out before Christmas. The QUE is set to be a little cheaper (around 300$) than the DR800 (around 400$), but both are below one psychological threshold (500$) and the QUE at least is just at what the industry sees as the key threshold (300).
By the time these start to appear in the classroom, I suspect it will not be very long before profs and students alike embrace them. I have made the case here before, but students are tired of carrying around bags full of paper, and both profs and students wary of the waste involved in printing thousands of pages a year. There may be some interesting pedagogical effets as well. Right now, a lot of the readings that I or my students do tends to be on the computer. But the computer is a particularly bad place to read, and not only because it is chronically bad for the eyes, not to mention the back. The problem with reading on the computer is that it is the equivalent of reading in a crowded and very distracting room. One is at the mercy of email and chat notifications and the constant temptation of looking things up on the internet. As a result, the quality of our reading experience has gone down drastically. It is urgent for universities to reinvent the act of reading as an act that requires exclusive attention and is not constantly interrupted by the demands of the digital world. As far as I can see, decently priced, highly portable epaper reading devices will create more opportunities for us to detach our reading experience from the computer, consciously decide what we actually want to read and what we can just skim through (because of the decision about what has to be downloaded). It will, on the long run, make for a more balanced digital academic learning experience. Therein lies the simple beauty of reinventing paper.
It now seems that at last a new generation of ebook readers is about to emerge that targets among others this huge intermediary academic market. Both Irex's DR 800 and Plastic Logic's QUE have considerable promise. The QUE has an 8.5 x 11 inch screen, whilst the DR800 boast an 8.1 diagonal. The QUE has a gesture based interface, whilst the DR800 works with a stylus. Both are clearly Pdf friendly, and based on open platforms. Both
have wired and wireless capability. The QUE is scheduled to premiere in Vegas on January 2010, whilst the DR800 should be out before Christmas. The QUE is set to be a little cheaper (around 300$) than the DR800 (around 400$), but both are below one psychological threshold (500$) and the QUE at least is just at what the industry sees as the key threshold (300).By the time these start to appear in the classroom, I suspect it will not be very long before profs and students alike embrace them. I have made the case here before, but students are tired of carrying around bags full of paper, and both profs and students wary of the waste involved in printing thousands of pages a year. There may be some interesting pedagogical effets as well. Right now, a lot of the readings that I or my students do tends to be on the computer. But the computer is a particularly bad place to read, and not only because it is chronically bad for the eyes, not to mention the back. The problem with reading on the computer is that it is the equivalent of reading in a crowded and very distracting room. One is at the mercy of email and chat notifications and the constant temptation of looking things up on the internet. As a result, the quality of our reading experience has gone down drastically. It is urgent for universities to reinvent the act of reading as an act that requires exclusive attention and is not constantly interrupted by the demands of the digital world. As far as I can see, decently priced, highly portable epaper reading devices will create more opportunities for us to detach our reading experience from the computer, consciously decide what we actually want to read and what we can just skim through (because of the decision about what has to be downloaded). It will, on the long run, make for a more balanced digital academic learning experience. Therein lies the simple beauty of reinventing paper.
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