[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