Free Kindles At Princeton?

You might not have to make your way to Labyrinth to pick up your 30 pounds of textbooks next semester.Princeton is joining the likes of Yale, Oxford and Berkeley in publishing its textbooks on Kindle, which weighs a hefty... 10.2 ounces.Meanwhile, Engadget has acquired leaks of the new Kindle, which has a larger page display and an annotation feature. The new Kindle, which may be Amazon's attempt to make its product more attractive to a younger generation (70 percent of Kindle users are over 40), launches tomorrow.Wired thinks the new Kindle is  going to "clean up in the textbook market."

Textbook sized pages? Check. Note-adding capabilities? Check. Support for standard e-documents (PDF)? Check, check, check.

But how can we get them FOR FREE?From Business Week:

Six universities including Case Western, Pace, and Princeton are partnering with Amazon and major publishers to supply students with the new device in the fall, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's Princeton pedigree (he's class of '86) probably has something to do with the school getting in on this pilot program.But don't get too excited.  At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, the deal will look like this: only a select group of students will be given Kindles with chemistry, computer science and freshman seminar textbooks loaded into them. The university will then compare the experiences of students with Kindles and students with traditional textbooks.For those of us who aren't getting free Kindles, the price ($350) may seem a little daunting, and the idea of not being able to resell or share textbooks is an inconvenience. And there's something to be said for bright yellow highlighter. But how many times have we asked the heavens for a Ctrl+F function in our textbooks?Yep, Kindle's got it.