According to Ars Technica, Darden Business School students are unhappy with the Amazon Kindle DX in terms of academic usefulness. That’s not to say that they’re down on the DX in general: there’s pretty high support amongst Darden students for the DX as a personal e-reader. It’s just not quite the classroom supplement that Darden administration had hoped it would be.
I don’t think this is entirely surprising: the e-reader is still a pretty novel invention. Heck, desktop computers have been in schools for decades and they’re still poorly utilized! To think that a second-generation device in a brand new market is going to revolutionize higher learning is a bit wishful.
I think we can all agree that the promise of e-readers is exciting: replace a stack of heavy books with a single svelte device. But even the most sophisticated device is still going to have major limitations in comparison to the basic utility of your standard textbook.