Several universities are testing out the new Kindle DX, hoping to save money and paper on printing (Photo source: K.lee at Wikimedia Commons)
This fall, six colleges and
universities are throwing out
a lot of their textbooks. Rebecca
Williams reports they’re testing
out the idea of students using
electronic readers for some
classes instead of textbooks:
Transcript
This fall, six colleges and universities are throwing out a lot of their textbooks. Rebecca Williams reports they’re testing out the idea of students using electronic readers for some classes instead of textbooks:
The schools are Case Western, Arizona State, Reed College, Pace University, The University of Virginia’s business school and Princeton.
They’re all testing out the new Kindle DX – it’s got a large screen that the text of textbooks will be loaded into.
Cass Cliatt is with Princeton. She says the University prints out 50 million sheets of paper a year – even though a lot of course material is online these days.
“So the irony is that the availability of digitized text has lead to an actual increase in printing because people don’t like to read a lot of text on computer screens.”
But she says these are different. The new Kindles let you highlight stuff and take notes the way you might in an actual textbook. So in theory, students won’t need to print.
Cliatt says they’ll be testing that theory to see if universities can save paper and money on printing.
For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.
