New way to read textbooks

Hopefully a lot of the students at Weber State University have heard of the Kindle. It's been around for a number of years and it's the cool new way for a person to read books, newspapers, and magazines. In May, Amazon, who makes the Kindle, came out with their newest version of the Kindle. It's bigger, it has more memory, and it has a better web browsing feature. It's called the Kindle DX and it now has a feature that allows customers to download textbooks. There are a lot of benefits to having all of your text books in one easy-to-find location. The Kindle DX is a heck of a lot lighter than carrying around your business law book and the four other books that you need that day. It also has a great search engine where you can find specific words in the text-making studying a lot easier. It can also hold hundreds of books, making it a lot easier to store the hundreds of textbooks that you have to buy over your college career. It also has great appeal for the procrastinating (and discriminating) student. Corina Laufiso, a communications major said, "I love the idea that I can buy and have the textbook instantly; I have the nasty habit of procrastinating and ending up spending hundreds of dollars on text books each semester." The great thing about being able to buy them instantly is that you can show up to the first day of class, find out whether you are really going to use the book or not and if so, you can download it right in the middle of class. There are other great benefits to using the Kindle DX rather than a conventional text book. Chris Englen, a PR major, pointed out, "You save trees; we should be moving in that direction with all of the technology we have." Because there is a drastic decrease of material needed to produce the textbooks, the price would (theoretically) reduce in proportion. There are of course some downsides to the Kindle DX. For example, it costs a whopping $489. This is of course a huge draw back for the average WSU student and there are other draw backs, too. Susan Hafen, a professor here at WSU said, "It will make it easier for students not to pay attention in class; they will be surfing the web or reading books and it will be a lot harder to tell than if they are texting or surfing the web on their laptops." The Kindle DX might not be the perfect answer students at WSU need for the high prices of textbooks but it is definitely in the right direction. Hopefully somewhere down the line Kindles will be as affordable as IPods are now, and like IPods, hopefully every student will have one so that they can carry all of their texts books in a small, cool little tablet.