Kindle Review

A cogent review of the Kindle reader was published in today's Inside Higher Education. Written by Alex Golub, who teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the review discusses whether Kindle is appropriate for use by academics. He concludes that Kindle's current design is best suited to pleasure reading and not to reading of academic texts--"the Kindle makes moving back and forth between endnotes, body text, and bibliographic material a tremendous pain--a key concern for scholars who read by moving through the main text of a book and its scholarly apparatus simultaneously." It is also difficult, if not impossible, to mark up the text on the Kindle, something that many academics do while reading print texts. Golub concludes that Kindle and its competitors "are not ready for prime time yet, [but] they are stil great places to outsource our pleasure reading and reference libraries. And soon they might be good for even more." I like the tone of this review--it is evenhanded and balanced.