[hugh3]

I use a nook for reading novels, but can't imagine using it for a textbook. Apart from the fact the page is too small, it just takes too long to flip back and forth looking for something, and that's the primary mode in which people use textbooks.

Besides, I still have my undergraduate textbooks from ten years ago on my shelf and occasionally look something up. If they'd been in an electronic format I'm sure it would be far too much trouble to find a reader for them.

[nooneelse]

About page size... I wondered when the iPad first came out about the screen size vs paper textbooks. I thought it would be too small given my memories of carrying all those big, painfully heavy books around.

But I wanted to check my intuitions against some facts. And I happily remembered that I have an old _An Introductory Course in College Physics_ from 1958 on the shelf. The pages from 1958 measure 5 1/4" by 8 1/4". Much much smaller feeling than the (typical from my college time) Tipler, _Physics_, with pages of 7 1/2" by about 11".

But the diagrams are not worse in any substantial way on the smaller pages. And the text is all quite clear and elaborates things quite well. Only very few of the larger tables, like the one showing the moments of inertia for various shapes, take up the entire, larger page in the younger book.

So I guess my point is, textbooks can work just fine with smaller pages if they are laid out with that in mind. The benefit of focusing the reader's full attention on a few diagrams and explanations at a time might easily outweigh being able to pack more information on a larger page.

[hugh3]

You're right, there's no need for undergraduate textbooks to be nearly as big and as heavy as they are -- they merely got that way in order to justify their enormous pricetags. With a book like Tipler I'm pretty sure the material could be rewritten in a book half the size.

Physics textbooks rapidly get smaller and lighter the more advanced the material gets, though.

[ja27]

A Kindle (or other similar e-ink device) would be great for textbooks that you didn't jump around in, like literature or history. But even jumping between reading and exercises is a chore. Typing notes is horrible on the Kindle's keyboard.

But I could see a future where a student carried perhaps two 8"x10" e-ink displays in a package no bigger than a composition notebook. They could have two different page views of the same book (or multiple books), with wireless sync between them. Touch (at least resistive) could improve the interface for highlighting and some notes. It'd be easy to support slim wireless keyboards for longer notes. I don't know if they'll ever be able to improve the speed of the displays unless they change technologies.

[Qz]

Literature and history books involve ungodly amounts of page flipping when it comes time to write your term papers (which for many students probably accounts for 95% of the time they actually spend reading the book...).

[sukuriant]

The main reason I completely turned down the kindle was the note-taking method. It's poor, in my personal and arrogant opinion. When I'm writing notes in books, it's just that, writing them. I want to use my hand to carve out words in a way that's not as impersonal as typing a text.

For that reason, I'm looking into the new Sony eReaders[1], specifically the 650, because they have a touch-screen that you can write on and not-too-bad note-taking capabilities. For the price, I think they're going to be the best of the eReaders for higher education, if people can just find them.

[1] http://tinyurl.com/2usvro8