Amazon announced a pilot program at some of the nations most prestigious universities with the release of the new kindle DX – or super sized ebook reader. (Read the kindle DX post here.) The well funded Ivy League school, Princeton University, posted a website with details about the kindle DX pilot program. The $30,000 cost for the pilot program at Princeton is being made possible through the High Meadows sustainability fund. The cost of the ebook reader pilot is a fraction of the $3.5 million dollar endowment that seeks to "accelerate sustainability efforts in research, education, and civic engagement."
Beyond the sustainability message, however, the school stands to reap significant cost savings if the kindle DX changes students reading habits. For all of the collaborative, online learning students are still
printing truck loads of supporting electronic documents for their
coursework. The top reasons cited by the students for printing the supporting, digital coursework range from ease of use to portability. The younger iPod, gadget crazed generations who grew up immersed in
technology, are reveling in the simplicity of reading and annotating a
sheet of paper. The university printed 50 million sheets of paper last year at a cost of $5 million. A fifth of that printing was generated from student computing clusters, presumably from networked enterprise level digital copiers.
Last year, Princeton printed 50 million sheets of paper at the cost of
$5 million. Over 10 million sheets were printed in student computing
clusters, much of that generated by printing digitzed text.
For all of technological triumphs there has yet been a technology that
can match the tactile experience of paper, but Amazon and academia are
hoping the kindle DX is the answer.
