The Reed College Kindle Study

Trina Marmarelli, Instructional Technologist

Martin Ringle, Chief Technology Officer

Background

In the fall of 2008 Reed College met with some fifteen other colleges and universities to discuss

the possibility of evaluating a new eReader (later identified as the Kindle DX) in a higher

education setting. Reed was subsequently selected by Amazon as one of seven institutions to

participate in a pilot study. The other schools were: Arizona State University, Case Western

Reserve University, Pace University, Princeton University, the University of Washington, and

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French 451: Special Topics in French Literature — The History of Truth and

Authenticity from Montaigne to Sartre

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Political Science 422: Nuclear Politics — The origins and effects of the spread of

nuclear weapons

This report summarizes the goals and format of the study, what we learned from student and

faculty participants, and observations about the future of eReader technologies. We also discuss

eReader accessibility issues and a Department of Justice investigation that focused on them.

Goals and Format of the Study

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to assess the overall prospects of eReaders in higher education

Although we examined eReader devices from several vendors

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the Kindle DX was the only

device we evaluated in a live course setting.

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thoughtful feedback. The faculty members were: Robert Knapp (English), Luc Monnin (French), and Alexander

Montgomery-Amo (Political Science).

their participation was entirely voluntary. They were told that if they choose not to participate

they would be able to obtain printed course materials in the usual manner. It was initially

anticipated that perhaps half of eligible students would participate. To our surprise, roughly 95%

of the students signed up for the pilot.

Students agreed to abide by the Amazon Kindle terms of use

A "getting started" sheet was distributed to students when they received their Kindles at the

beginning of the semester. Beyond the help sheet and some very basic guidance, there was

virtually no end-user support provided by the College. Questions about how to use the device

were well answered by the documentation contained on the Kindle itself. In two cases there

were device malfunctions that involved replacement of the hardware.

Outcomes of the Study

Feedback about the Kindle DX provided by students and faculty covered a wide range of issues.

Items that elicited the most positive remarks included the following:

Legibility –– There was general agreement that the Kindle display (based on technology

provided by E-Ink Corporation

) was extremely legible. Although students observed that the

Form factor –– The size, weight, and general configuration of the Kindle DX were well

received. Students found that they could hold it comfortably for many hours of reading, carry it

easily in their backpacks, and place it before them in class without cluttering their workspaces.

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Battery life –– There was unanimous praise for the "long distance" battery life of the Kindle DX.

With the Kindle wireless feature turned off, students reported that they could go for a week or

more without needing to re-charge the battery. They also liked the fact that the external power

supply was lightweight and well designed.

Durability –– There was some initial concern that the Kindle DX might be

too fragile to stand up to the rigors of college life. Accordingly, each

student was given a padded Kindle cover (with the name and/or logo of the

pilot institution) in order to protext the device from cracks, scratches, or

even with the cover removed. Virtually no damage was reported during the

them to cut down dramatically on printing and this proved to be the case. One course, for

example, used nearly seventy articles that might have otherwise generated tens of thousands of

printed pages. Most students, however, reported that they were able to read the articles in PDF

format on the Kindle well enough to obviate the need for printing. Many students viewed this

reduction in paper use as both an environmental and an economic benefit and one of the most

promising impacts of eReader technology.

Over-the-air distribution –– A number of students indicated that they purchased items (or

acquired free texts) online for pleasure reading or other personal uses and were delighted to be

able to download a text in a minute or less via the Kindle's cellular network.

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The ease of

browsing books in the Kindle store, the wide selection of titles, the lack of cell charges, and the

speed of downloading texts from any location were mentioned as compelling features of the

Kindle DX. (We noted that platforms that required a computer connection for text downloading

seemed cumbersome by contrast to the Kindle.)

Kindle DX in class didn't lead to the distractions that are typical of laptop use. Students were not

tempted to check their email, browse the web, or use the Kindle in class for anything except to

refer to course materials. The functional limitations of the platform, generally viewed as a

Materials availability –– Despite aggressive efforts, Amazon was unable to obtain all of the

readings the faculty wished to assign in their courses. In the case of the French literature course

(where all of the assigned readings were in French) the instructor had to provide most of the

materials himself, relying primarily on public-domain electronic texts. We had hoped that an

Oxford American Dictionary included as a standard feature on the Kindle DX, but this was not

the case.

The other two courses fared somewhat better: the assigned books were available—although not

a significant number of journal articles, which would normally be provided online through the

PDF formatting –– The Kindle DX is capable of displaying PDFs, but much of the device’s

functionality is lost: annotation, highlighting, text-resizing, text-to-speech, and other features are

unavailable. To avoid this loss of functionality, we used the Mobipocket conversion utility to

convert the assigned journal articles to the .prc eBook format. The conversion process required a

significant amount of staff time to produce acceptable results, particularly for older articles that

needed to accommodate footnotes, two-column page layouts, charts, and tables. File conversion

took at least an hour, and often much longer, for each article. In the case of the Political Science

course, whose readings included nearly seventy articles, the conversion process could not be

completed in time for the start of classes.

PDF distribution –– Amazon was not involved in the processing of assigned journal articles and

we were hesitant to store copies of the articles on Amazon's servers, even temporarily, due to

Images and color –– The Kindle DX’s relatively low screen resolution and grayscale display

made it was ill suited to present the kinds of complex diagrams, charts, and images that are often

did not present an immediate problem, but it did contribute to the students’ skepticism about their

Kindle DXs’ suitability for future academic work.

the item was added or last opened, but there was no provision for organizing materials in a

conventional folder hierarchy. As the number of stored items grew, the need to scroll

sequentially through lengthy title lists became a serious impediment to the use of the Kindle

during classroom discussions. Amazon has since announced plans to implement a folder

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Page refresh and skimming –– Although students enjoyed the long battery life afforded by the

Kindle DX’s E-Ink technology they were less enthusiastic about the page refresh rate. They

found "page turning" on the Kindle to be appreciably slower than page turning for print materials

document on the Kindle DX kept them from skimming texts. When asked if the Kindle search

Referring to texts in class –– All three courses in the study were upper-division seminars

centered around careful reading and discussion of the assigned texts; in such courses, students

typically are expected to support their claims with specific textual evidence, and everyone in the

class needs to be able to quickly locate the same passages in the texts in order to keep the

discussion moving. The Kindle DX did not facilitate either of these needs because of the

Rather than using page numbers, Kindle eBooks use location numbers to overcome the

idiosyncrasies of manipulating font size and word density on the screen. The Kindle’s location

numbers are tied to specific points in the texts, so in theory, if everyone in a class uses a Kindle

they should be able to move to a specific location just as they would to a specific numbered page.

In practice, however, the need to use the Kindle DX’s five-way control and small keyboard to

input a location number made the navigation process extremely slow, particularly since the

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texts in the course of a single session. Without the ability to open and switch between different

windows (as students could easily do on their computers), it was virtually impossible to navigate

smoothly between multiple texts. Because of these difficulties, students reported that their in-

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libraries, to be released as an over-the-air software update next year.” (November 19, 2009)

Highlighting and annotation –– The difficulty of manipulating the Kindle DX’s five-way

controller and keyboard meant that students were very unlikely to use the Kindle DX to annotate

their texts, since entering text with the keyboard was too slow. In addition, notes could appear

made them less useful than traditional, handwritten marginal notes.

Highlighting was less problematic, but still suffered from the difficulty of using the five-way

controller to navigate to the appropriate location to begin highlighting. Consequently, some

Kindles; others marked up paper copies of the texts; still others drastically reduced the extent to

navigation and keyboard make location numbers and notes considerably easier to enter than on

the Kindle DX. One of the faculty participants in the study filmed an experiment in which he

performed identical tasks—going to a specific location number, highlighting a passage, and

adding a note—using the iPhone Kindle app and the Kindle DX. On the iPhone, he finished the

tasks in roughly thirty seconds, while it took him twice as long to perform the same tasks on the

Kindle DX.

(While he did not perform the same tasks with an actual book as part of the

students and faculty expressed their belief that in order for an eReader to be useful for academic

purposes the technology will need to match the flexibility and ease of jotting notes on paper,

flipping from page to page, and spreading multiple texts across a desk.

Content comprehension –– By far the most troublesome feedback we received during the study

was from a faculty member who felt that his students' comprehension of the reading materials

suffered from use of the Kindle DX. He speculated that the difficulty students encountered with

Both faculty and students agreed that this problem, though critical to the academic use of

eReaders, could be easily addressed by technology that would allow quick and easy text

highlighting and annotation. Indeed, they pointed out that effective digital highlighting and

comprehension, there was considerable optimism that future eReaders would be able to

overcome this problem and might actually help to increase comprehension.

Toward the end of the Kindle study at Reed stories began to appear in various media outlets and

blogs regarding the issue of eReader accessibility for visually impaired or blind individuals. The

stories focused a great deal of attention on the issue but engendered some confusion as well.

feature for materials stored in its .AZW format, provided that the copyright holder has authorized

Amazon to apply TTS. What the Kindle DX (and Kindle 2) lacked was an application of TTS to

navigation and other controls. Hence, while a visually impaired or blind individual could listen

to a text he or she could not navigate among stored texts, navigate within a text, browse the

2's text to speech technology.! Some of these customers have asked that we make Kindle even

easier for them by adding navigation accessible to the blind.! We want to let those customers know

that this is something we are working on and we look forward to making it available in the

future.!

While this statement expressed Amazon's intention to improve accessibility on the Kindle, two

advocacy groups, the American Council of the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind,

with the Departments of Education and Justice about the Kindle pilot study. The complaints

asserted that the schools participating in the study were violating the Americans with Disabilities

Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. These statutes, among other things, require

individuals with disabilities so as not to exclude them from the services or resources provided by

technology were insufficient to deflect the complaint.

The Department of Justice investigated the complaint and resolved the matter in January 2010,

reaching written agreements with several of the pilot study institutions, including Reed. In the

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ongoing use; (b) subscribing to a technology (as in the case of cloud computing or a hosted service); (c) requiring

students or and/or other individuals to use a specific technology; (d) providing support services for privately owned

require, or recommend "dedicated electronic book readers" unless such devices are "fully

accessible to students with visual impairments" or the college "provides reasonable

accommodation or modification for this type of technology to its students with visual

impairments."

Contrary to some public discussions of the matter, the Department of Justice agreement had "no

effect on Reed College's... pilot program testing the Kindle DX" and was "not intended to

preclude other pilot programs or product testing designed to evaluate the features, including

accessibility features, of new technologies so long as reasonable accommodation or modification

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Kindle, the #1 bestselling product across all of Amazon, has

enabled many vision-impaired readers to enjoy books more easily than before, and has also helped

dyslexic readers and those with learning disabilities improve their reading skills. Vision impaired

print edition. Dyslexic readers benefit from being able to listen with Kindle's text-to-speech

customers and customers with learning disabilities over the past two years who have been helped

modifications, we believe Kindle can be a breakthrough device for the blind, and the team is

excited about making these enhancements.”

Whether or not future Kindles, other eReaders, or multi-function platforms such as the iPad

provide the breakthrough that Amazon and other manufacturers envision, it is clear that

accessibility for individuals with disabilities is a key condition for widespread adoption of

eReader technologies in higher education.

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http://www.ada.gov/reed_college.htm

other course materials. With the average cost of course materials exceeding $1,000 per year,

this is perhaps the most powerful factor driving both the development of the technology and

student interest in eBooks and eReaders. Expectations abound that, if successful, this technology

could decrease the cost of purchasing course materials by 50% or more. However, there are

During the time of the study, the retail price of the Kindle DX was $489. Other eReader pricing

varied from $199 to $859.

When students were asked if they would purchase a Kindle DX (or

other dedicated eReader) for academic use, they indicated that the price would need to drop

However, many students suggested that they would be willing to spend considerably more for a

thrive or whether they will ultimately be replaced by more expensive (but more functional)

tablets and/or netbooks is a provocative one. Dozens of hardware manufacturers and content

providers are betting their futures on the answer. Some believe that the benefits of E-Ink

technology, increases in functionality, improvements to the user interface, continued price

reduction, and rich content offerings will make dedicated eReaders a hot commodity for years to

come. Others believe that the maturity of LCD technology, its capacity for live video, the

availability of new content channels, and the potential to compete with laptops give tablets and

netbooks a head start that dedicated eReaders will be unable to overcome.

Which of these perspectives will prevail is a purely empirical matter. But we shouldn't have to

wait too long to learn the answer. During the next eighteen months both technologies will evolve

significantly. The Apple iPad and other tablets will push the price/function envelope while

eReaders are likely to gain color, a touch interface, and expanded functions (such as real web

The future suggested by recent developments in eBook pricing, however, is less promising.

Apple’s agreements with several major publishers, including the Hachette Book Group and

See, for example: http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/acsfa/edlite-txtbkstudy.html or