I have said before that my research is still largely paper-based and that I use my Kindle exclusively for pleasure reading. This isn’t entirely true: I do use a combo of Mendeley and Evernote on my iPad for journal articles. However, the fact remains that my primary texts are just about always of the paper and cloth variety. As a new academic year rolls around, I can’t help but wonder how much longer that will be the case, and how long it will be before I am teaching to a classroom full of Kindle-holders. When will an instruction such as “turn to page 34” consist of more button-tapping than page-turning?
A great number of the novels that I regularly teach are now out of copyright–including James Joyce, who has been out of copyright for a full 9 months –and are available widely and freely in a number of eReader formats. Having an entire semester’s reading list on one device would undoubtedly have a great many benefits: an unanticipated seminar tangent could be taken even further if all the students were able to quickly turn to the book that we were discussing; annotations and marginalia could be shared between all the members of the class, creating a real community of learning. And it seems, leaving my love of paper and print culture aside, that a classroom full of Kindles linked to Twitter could, perhaps, create a positive impact on my learning and teaching.
Continue reading “When Will Kindles Be Ready for the University Classroom?”