The Test-Run at Univ of Washington with Kindle DX's

Seattle's KOMO Newsroom reports on the test run of the Kindle DX being done by the University of Washington, with 40 graduate students participating in using the Kindle DX in place of both textbooks and classroom reading materials this semester.

They need to see how well that might work.  Seven universities are taking part, and the University of Washington students will be among the first to actually get the Kindles.

  This is the fundamental question posed:
"How would you have to change a device that was designed as a personal pleasure device to turn it into a learning device?"

  Professor Dan Grossman says, "We want to be able to annotate and highlight and flip back and forth and have that physical experience," he said.
  But on the other side, he says, "We want to be able to search and look up and have massive amounts of information on one lightweight device." - a strength of the Kindle.

PILOT PROGRAM BLOG
seattlest.com reports on the University's blog of results so far as noted on the UW Kindle Pilot blog by the Computer Science & Engineering Dept.

If you follow the link, you'll see they want to annotate PDFs, but since this can't be done under the current licensing with Adobe, the University is converting the PDFs to the Kindle's own format instead, in order to be able to annotate the text, but since the textbooks include engineering materials, there is multi-column material as well as equations, the layouts for which tend to be lost or mangled when converted to the normal text-oriented formats.

Seattlest.com's article interpreted the blog comments as reports that the PDFs themselves were not being shown correctly, with multi-column format changed to single column format only and the math "messed up."

CONVERTED FILES (no longer PDF)
However, it's actually the converted files (in Amazon format rather than PDF) which are not showing correctly.  A number of us have written about this since May, before the DX was released when we saw in the early User's Guide for the DX that they were not offering PDF annotation features (which normally requires a fuller Adobe license for support).  I wrote a comment at Seattlest.com to try to explain that the DX can read and display PDFs accurately but that the problem involves converted files in another format that don't interpret the PDF layout correctly.

WORKAROUND FOR THE TIME BEING
In the meantime, the school's Kindle Pilot blog details a workaround they're trying, using a PDF to WORD converter such as Nuance's and then using Word to reformat the document to single column (this will often not be appropriate) and then sending the single-column'd WORD doc to Amazon's converter to put it into the Amazon format.

The school is of course asking Amazon "if these things can be improved."

THE FUTURE?
I imagine they are!  While I think the tech team has done a really good job with these units and the study tools for the regular books, the Kindles are early consumer-priced versions versus the expensive iRex models (already here but $800+) and Plastic Logic model due in early Spring with good PDF annotation features and more file formats supported but which will cost quite a bit more while not offering web access for reference and research.

I think the DX screen at 9.7" is the smallest students could use for PDFs meant to display on a full letter page, and the landscape mode usually does help quite a bit in enlarging the fonts.  But for university use, I don't understand how students could enjoy not being able to highlight and add notes to their PDFs.  I'm puzzled why Amazon hasn't moved on this aspect of PDF use in academic settings for the coming Fall session as so many of us asked them to in May.  I'm hoping they find a way since they've chosen to run the college studies.

As a consumer-category customer not having to make notes for courses, I really enjoy reading on my DX (I find the screen beautiful to read from) and even highlighting and notating normal books, but if there is no other change coming, the one change they should make is to get the Adobe PDF annotations feature for the DX (and add the ePub format for all Kindles).