Kindle DX Fares Poorly With College Students

Amazon has been testing out its Kindle DX with university students around the country to research if its $489.00 eReader will be the device of choice on college campuses. The answer, it is not.

From the Seattle Times, “At the University of Virginia, as many as 80 percent of MBA students who participated in Amazon’s pilot program said they would not recommend the Kindle DX as a classroom study aid (though more than 90 percent liked it for pleasure reading).”

In the Times article, a 23-year old student named Franzi Roesner points out that the Kindle DX’s interface isn’t ideal for reading text books. “You don’t read textbooks in the same linear way as a novel,” she told The Times. “You have to flip back and forth between pages, and the Kindle is too slow for that. Also, the bookmarking function is buggy.”

In an earlier eBookNewser post, we reported similar complaints.

Apple has plans of its own to test iPads at universities. Brightly-colored and interactive pages combined with the Internet and a music and movie player might just make the $499 all-in-one device more attractive to students going off to school. What do you think?

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