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Remember that experiment which gave Princeton students Kindle DX Ebook Readers in place of printed text books, as reported on by myself and CTitantic? As you may recall, neither students nor professors were too happy with the Academic Ebook experience.

Well, the experiment continued at the University of Washington. It was quite simple. Certain classes were selected to have all their required reading provided on the Kindle DX rather then as printed books or photocopied papers. The DX is the larger Kindle designed to serve as a replacement for text books, magazines and newspapers. Rather then pass them out to liberal arts majors as they did at Princeton, at UW they gave the Ebook Readers to Computer Science grad students.

How did they do? Read on after the jump to check out their midterm marks.

Eric Engleman at TechFlash has spoken to a few of the students in the program, and it is interesting to see that they are making several of the same comments as the Princeton students; the lack of a way to easily annotate, highlight and mark up texts is a BIG problem, the fact that you can’t organize titles on the Kindle beyond a single list is a pain and printed books are simply easier for them to use. They did have some good things to say too, mainly things about how they feel good not killing trees and the Kindle is a lot easier to carry around then 20 textbooks.

Some of their comments clearly come out of simply being used to printed books (and in some cases, listening to too many internet rumors) but the students definitely make some good points. It is clear that for Ebook Readers to replace textbooks in academia, first and foremost they need to have touch screens students can write on and highlight easily and EPUB files that will save their notes accurately and in context.

Here are some highlights from their specific comments…

I don’t feel the desire to replace real books with reading on the Kindle (like, novels, non-fiction, etc.), not necessarily from a usability point of view but from a I-just-like-the-feel-and-collectability-of-real-books point of view. What I do find the Kindle most useful for is things that I would otherwise read on the computer — papers, news articles, etc.

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Soon after I got it, I turned it on, set it up and downloaded some of the free classic books that Amazon offers, but I haven’t really had time to read any of them. The only time I have for pleasure reading these days is at bedtime, and I haven’t used my Kindle for that because I’ve heard stories about people falling asleep on top of their Kindle and damaging the screen.

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On the down side: Managing the dozens of papers, lecture notes and texts on my Kindle is an exercise in frustration. The only organizational principle in use in the Kindle UI is "a single giant list of everything sorted by most recent access." This is not especially useful when I have 200 documents in that list.

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The biggest thing I miss with the Kindle is annotation. To me, reading isn’t just looking at words, it necessarily involves jotting notes. Unfortunately, the Kindle isn’t the best for this. The keyboard is tiny and impossible to use except in a pinch. Furthermore, it doesn’t let me annotate PDF files (i.e., all academic papers). So, I usually end up carrying a Kindle + a pad of paper to do any serious reading. If I could ask for anything, I’d want to be able to use a stylus to jot right on the page — but that’s probably "three to five years away."

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I have to say I totally agree with that comment….as much as I love and support Ebooks, I think the readers are three to five years away from being ready to make even a small dent in academic reading habits. I have a feeling that the advances in Reader technology coming in 2010 will be a big step forward, but a lot of work is needed before students will trust their grades and study time to Ebook Readers.