This could have been your Stan Katz reading, but no.

Remember when Princeton gave us Kindles, and we were like, Frick, that’s awesome! But after a while we were like, Frick, these suck. And then we were like, Frick, told you guys.

Well Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania is one-upping us and giving all of their students iPads. You know, those kind of useless big iPhones. But who cares because they’re free, man.

Via Techflash:

About 2,100 students attend Seton Hill, so at the lowest retail price point of $499 (and not factoring in any possible bulk discounts) it would amount to just over a $1 million initial investment.

Come on Princeton. I bet you spend that money on toilet paper, or something.

At any rate, just a little jealous of these kids. Because, as you might remember, apparently the Kindle job sucked. Thanks Princeton.

Over the summer, I received an unexpected e-mail from the University about my upcoming “Civil Society” seminar with Professor Stanley Katz.

Would I like to receive a $489 Kindle DX e-reader at no cost — and keep it after the course ends? Would I like to have my course books downloaded onto the device for free? It was like Christmas in July…

Read more over at the PAW.

Machines: Winning the War on Paper

Course offerings came out last week, and something felt different.

Fall break at home has roughly the same effect on my brain as high-caliber Novocaine, so the course guide had my full attention as soon as the website was up. I had never gone on the website first – it was always the place I went after I had my initial list of courses, gleaned from flipping through the thin, pulpy sheets of the paper course booklet. But how different could it really be?

Really, really different. I was completely overwhelmed. I tried looking at only one department at a time, but even then I was just staring at a list of numbers and course titles. Sure, more information was only a click away. But something about the process seemed too active – I was not browsing, I was power searching.

Why I care (and you should too!) after the jump.

And there’s something to be said for browsing. I talked to a friend who lamented that she could no longer take her time to ritualistically circle interesting courses on her first pass through the booklet. I loved being able to look through the departments I would never normally take a course in, just to see if anything caught my eye (it’s also really fun to imagine an alternate reality where I’m an ELE major).

The conspiracy theorist in me wants to point to the recent switch from textbooks to kindles in some classes, and suggest that the university is trying to recoup the losses to the endowment by crippling the paper industry and shorting paper companies. But the reality is probably much more benign. The move online saves paper, and money, and if this is one of the little things that students have to give up while the school cuts $170 million, I’m okay with that. But, I do think there’s one big change that could really help the current system.

Bring back the joy of browsing. Add an abstract to each course, so as we scroll through, we get a little more than a course name – give us a short summary, prerequisites, days and times, maybe even a little reading list. Something has been lost in the move away from the cheap paper course offerings, but it won’t be that hard to find.

(image source: wikicommons)

The future is now!

Are you one of the 50 or so Princeton students who received a $489 Kindle DX free-of-charge this semester?

I am.

You might have seen me around campus, catching up on my Tocqueville reading for class. I tend to hold it gingerly—it’s pretty, and I’m afraid of dropping it. I’m also kind of nervous around writing utensils and highlighters when reading my Kindle, lest I temporarily forget I’m not reading an actual book and accidentally start underlining the screen.It’s still too early to make grand pronouncements about whether the Kindle pilot project has been a success or failure. But as the Prince recently pointed out, there are disadvantages to using the gadget in a classroom setting.

Reading on the Kindle is easy and enjoyable—the screen mimics pigment so you’re not staring at a computer screen. You can control the size of the text, and if you’re feeling lonely, you can have a robotic male or female voice read aloud to you. It can hold up to 3500 books as well, so it saves paper and lightens your backpack’s load. All in all, it’s a great way to do some leisurely reading on your front porch as you wait for the mailman to come by.

But when you’re doing readings for class, the romance of reading becomes considerably less romantic. In fact, there is no romance at all. We’re usually in a frenzy—underlining with abandon, dog-earing left and right, and bemoaning the book’s length while we flip through its pages. We crawl into bed with our books, falling asleep and drooling all over them. Try to recreate this behavior with the Kindle DX, and you’re probably going to get electrocuted.

In class, things get a bit complicated with a Kindle as well. With real books, the professor usually announces which page to turn to during class discussions. With the Kindle, the professor has to say something like, “Please go to location 2783-53.” The location number is usually repeated several times because they tend to be absurdly long and nonsensical. Then, students have to type in that location number on a Sidekick-sized keyboard in order to get on the same “page.”

My Kindle DX next to a Blackberry and a Pequod, in case you were wondering how big it was.

Annotating on the Kindle DX is a challenge, too. Instead of scrawling your thoughts and observations in the margins of a real book, you have to create a note on the Kindle. Typing in a note takes a bit longer, and it’s hard to find them later since they appear only as a superscript number next to the word in which you inserted the note.

The biggest adjustment for me is the mystery of how much reading you’re supposed to do. I am a simple man: I look at the thickness of the book I’m supposed to read and plan accordingly. With the Kindle, it’s actually quite difficult to figure out how much reading you’ve been assigned because you don’t have page numbers. You can’t flip through the reading either, unless you want to click the “Next Page” button a gazillion times, wait for the lag (yes, the Kindle lags), and develop carpal tunnel syndrome.

When my Kindle is on sleep mode, Jane Austen sometimes stares at me indifferently. But sometimes the screen displays birds or other dead people.

On the plus side, the Kindle DX comes with 3G internet, which, aside from receiving your e-books wirelessly, is useful for surfing the web on a terrible mobile browser. Apparently, you can also download and listen to music, but I have yet to cross that bridge.

School has only been in session for a few weeks, so I’ll reserve any final judgment until I’ve used the Kindle more. Until then, I’ll continue being that kid in the library who is awkwardly clutching onto his Kindle, frozen with fear that he’ll drop it and break it into a million pieces. (It’s become a recurring nightmare.)

During summer, when there are no parties to break, or drunk students to catch urinating, what exactly does PSafe do? Catch criminals, that’s what. In this week’s edition: Water guns? Public lewdness? Princeton quickly becomes the next possible locale of a CSI spin-off. Meanwhile, The New Yorker is all like, “You guys were so right about the Kindle thing,” and coincidentally “the Kindle ate my homework” becomes a viable excuse. Also, oh my God!, the Princeton Review made lists of colleges and people  freak out about them.

Public enemies.

• Remember that call you got Monday morning from the automated robot woman who cried wolf? About a possible gunman on campus and staying indoors and all that? That was because Public Safety heard from an employee that spotted a young man with what looked like a gun (prompting the flurry of emails and calls to students and faculty). Well, couple minutes later, turns out the guy was a camp counselor carrying around a water gun. Again, those sick sons of bitches at Nerf spark a Princeton lockdown . While we certainly appreciate the attention to campus safety (really! we do!), we’re sure that everyone would prefer a little more discretion at PSafe Headquarters before pressing the big red panic button.

• Moving on down the police blotter… Guess who decided to make an appearance on campus this weekend? Yes, that’s right, our very own Professor of Public Lewdness, the Princeton Masturbator. Not to be outdone by watergun-toting teenagers, the wanker struck again, this time between Clio and West College. Sporting a hip but conservative white button-down and jeans, the young man asked a visiting lady for some directions Saturday night, while, you know, exposing his genitals. But folks!, this might be the end of an era. Shortly after receiving the call about the man, PSafe sprang into action and actually caught the perp, took him into custody, and charged him. Could this have been the wanker’s last strike? Is there more than one of them? Just why does he always hang around Clio Hall and East Pyne? Why does he always ask for directions? Is he lost and looking for a way home? So many unanswered questions – we’ll keep you updated with any answers.

• This week in “Dude we were SO right about this“: This week’s New Yorker features a review of Amazon’s Kindle. Fervent book-fan Nicholson Baker issued a harsh review of the Kindle 2, noting the paltry book selection in the Kindle store, the crummy textbook graphics on it, the fact that it “kills the joy” of newspapers (besides not including all their content), how the thing is so “cold and grey” and sucks the life out of words (or something), and on and on. Oh, right, also: Apparently if you take notes on the thing, there’s a chance their existence hinges on the whims of Amazon. A student had taken notes on a novel on his Kindle, only to have the book and his notes deleted when Amazon pulled the book from their store (1984, of all ironies). Like a good litigious American, he’s suing. So, to those of you diving into next semester with a Kindle DX: have fun lugging that thing around!
  

  Sadly, we didn't chart for "Students pack the stadiums." Or even for "Students know of stadium's existence"

• What do colleges like? Lists. What do colleges like Princeton like? Being at the top of lists. Good news for us, then: the Princeton Review released their “Best 371 Colleges” this week, with 62(!) ranking lists. The press is a-buzz because, wow, college kids drink (that, and colleges have 62 chances to say, “Look we made the top of a list!”). Princeton nabbed a few of these titles, like “Best Library” (#2), “Students who study the most”(#9), “Most beautiful campus” (#7), and “Most politically active students” (#18). You’d think our students are always carrying around freshly-checked out books on Eastern philosophy and modern geometry, reading them on lush lawns and basking in the warm sunlight, studying intently for their midterm three months away, all while coordinating their latest sit-in against the administration. Which, I think, is only true in the admissions brochures.

• First things first. Oh, right, that Sotomayor person we’ve been hearing about: Well she was better at Princeton than we are, and her first couple of nights at the U. she thought that a cricket was in her room (But it was actually outside! How funny is that!). And she’s on her way to becoming the second Princeton grad on the Supreme Court. No big deal. But seriously, can we just confirm her and move on? This is taking longer than Michael Jackson’s autopsy.

Peek-a-boo-hoo

• Meanwhile, theStreet.com updates us on another alum who’s not doing as hot as ol’ Sonia. Jeff Peek ‘69 is CEO of CIT, a company providing small and midsized commercial loans. CIT’s not doing too hot these days, and on Thursday, federal regulators denied CIT a bail out. The company’s stock crashed nearly 75%. The article suggests some fingers are pointing at Peek. And a little digging found that Peek’s wife penned an anonymous article in Portfolio recently, in which she complained about how because of the recession she couldn’t throw moneybags around, or something. Princeton alums: Win some, lose some.

• This week in “studies that contribute little to our understanding of the world”: The Telegraph reports that “Researchers have found that using [moving walkways] at airports, especially at busy times, can actually slow you down because people reduce their walking pace on the human conveyor belts and cause blockages.” Travelers everywhere slowly are realizing they have been living a lie. Princeton locomotion researcher Manoj Srinivasan contributed mathematical models to the study to show “that people slow down on walkways to reduce energy consumption.” Well, yeah, I’m sure tons of lazy people would ride around in motorized scooters to “reduce energy consumption.”

• This week in “I told you so”: The Wall Street Journal writes on the latest  trend of using “e-books” instead of hard copy texts in higher education. They report that in a “Student PIRG study, 75% of college students said they would prefer print to digital texts.” The organization running the study “slammed existing e-textbook efforts such as CourseSmart for “being on the wrong track.” The article states also that students in pilot courses testing the Kindle have been bailing out of using the thing, preferring hard copies to e-books. They don’t see the use, it seems. Wait, that sounds familiar… Oh, yes, right, we said that.

• 

  Sure he's smiling, but he's crying on the inside

  In case you didn’t hear, we’re bad at another sport now that we’re losing our head lacrosse coach, Bill Tierney, to University of Denver. But he’s going to miss us, or at least that’s what we got from this cheesy profile by the AP. Best moment: “Packing up the plaques was easy. The letters were harder. He read through each one, a box of tissues close by.” Well I’d be crying too if I were moving to Denver.

• If at one point this week you happened to be asking yourself, “I wonder what Wilson School professor Stan Katz is doing this weekend,” then you’re in luck. The man himself posted a riveting narrative of his experiences on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Brainstorm” blog. He apparently watched Frozen River on Thursday evening (”a superb DVD”) and went to see Harry Potter on Friday (”overly plot-driven, hard to follow, overblown, pretentious, and genuinely tedious”). On Saturday he went to see the opera Lucia di Lammermoor. He plans to barbecue tonight. This post was a brainstorm indeed. (Note: Reading the actual post is not recommended. We apologize for including this dull bit, but, as the saying goes, “Nothing ever happens in/around/about/concerning Princeton.”)

(source: techblog.dallasnews.com)

TechRadar reported today on Princeton’s pilot project for cutting down on paper usage by using Kindle e-books for course readings. Looks like we were right in our predictions earlier this week, but mistaken about one thing: the hardware. The project plans to use the new Kindle DX, released by Amazon today.

The awkwardly-titled “Toward Print-Less and Paper-Less Courses: Pilot Amazon Kindle Program” aims “to encourage students to work with documents online rather than rely on printing.” The University News reports that the initiative is funded under the auspices of the University’s Sustainability Plan.

The project basically looks like this:

Under the pilot, the reading materials for three courses due to start in the autumn will be loaded on Kindle DX devices. Participating students and faculty members in the selected courses will receive a free DX that they will be allowed to keep.

It’s a noble and ambitious move, sure, and apparently not all that expensive (at an actually reasonable $30,000 price tag for the University and no fee for participating students), but come on, this thing is going to fall flat on its face.

Reasons why after the jump.

1.) The Kindle DX has extremely limited note-taking capabilities.

Um, the ability to take notes on paper is the foremost, if not the only, reason anyone ever prints stuff out anyway. Few people ever read their course work on their computers, and it’s highly doubtful people will resort to using the DX’s thumb keyboard. That no one took this into consideration when making the pilot program is kind of ludicrous and the main reason the project will probably turn out to be a waste.

2.) Most students carry around their computers anyway.

If students really did want to cut down on printing and stare at a pretty, glossy surface all day, they could just turn to their MacBooks instead of a less-functional version of the same thing. Because, really, the Kindle DX is just a glorified computer screen at this point. Why carry around two pieces of technology when you could just carry one that was multi-functional?

But alright, if you’re optimistic and think kids will actually cut down on printing, maybe there is an economic justification to be made, as TechRadar hints:

Last year, Princeton printed 50 million sheets of paper at the cost of $5 million (£3.3 million) and 25,000 trees. If e-readers can cut down that printing by 1 per cent, Princeton will have more than made up for what was spent on this pilot.

Well, someone has to be the guinea pig, right? Why not us?

(image source: blogs.law.harvard.edu)

You might not have to make your way to Labyrinth to pick up your 30 pounds of textbooks next semester.

Princeton is joining the likes of Yale, Oxford and Berkeley in publishing its textbooks on Kindle, which weighs a hefty… 10.2 ounces.

Meanwhile, Engadget has acquired leaks of the new Kindle, which has a larger page display and an annotation feature. The new Kindle, which may be Amazon’s attempt to make its product more attractive to a younger generation (70 percent of Kindle users are over 40), launches tomorrow.

Wired thinks the new Kindle is  going to “clean up in the textbook market.”

Textbook sized pages? Check. Note-adding capabilities? Check. Support for standard e-documents (PDF)? Check, check, check.

But how can we get them FOR FREE?

From Business Week:

Six universities including Case Western, Pace, and Princeton are partnering with Amazon and major publishers to supply students with the new device in the fall, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s Princeton pedigree (he’s class of ‘86) probably has something to do with the school getting in on this pilot program.

But don’t get too excited.  At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, the deal will look like this: only a select group of students will be given Kindles with chemistry, computer science and freshman seminar textbooks loaded into them. The university will then compare the experiences of students with Kindles and students with traditional textbooks.

For those of us who aren’t getting free Kindles, the price ($350) may seem a little daunting, and the idea of not being able to resell or share textbooks is an inconvenience. And there’s something to be said for bright yellow highlighter. But how many times have we asked the heavens for a Ctrl+F function in our textbooks?

Yep, Kindle’s got it.