My Kindle DX and I: An Arranged Marriage

Are you one of the 50 or so Princeton students who received a $489 Kindle DX free-of-charge this semester?I am.You might have seen me around campus, catching up on my Tocqueville reading for class. I tend to hold it gingerly—it’s pretty, and I’m afraid of dropping it. I’m also kind of nervous around writing utensils and highlighters when reading my Kindle, lest I temporarily forget I’m not reading an actual book and accidentally start underlining the screen.It’s still too early to make grand pronouncements about whether the Kindle pilot project has been a success or failure. But as the Prince recently pointed out, there are disadvantages to using the gadget in a classroom setting.Reading on the Kindle is easy and enjoyable—the screen mimics pigment so you’re not staring at a computer screen. You can control the size of the text, and if you’re feeling lonely, you can have a robotic male or female voice read aloud to you. It can hold up to 3500 books as well, so it saves paper and lightens your backpack’s load. All in all, it’s a great way to do some leisurely reading on your front porch as you wait for the mailman to come by.But when you’re doing readings for class, the romance of reading becomes considerably less romantic. In fact, there is no romance at all. We’re usually in a frenzy—underlining with abandon, dog-earing left and right, and bemoaning the book’s length while we flip through its pages. We crawl into bed with our books, falling asleep and drooling all over them. Try to recreate this behavior with the Kindle DX, and you’re probably going to get electrocuted.In class, things get a bit complicated with a Kindle as well. With real books, the professor usually announces which page to turn to during class discussions. With the Kindle, the professor has to say something like, “Please go to location 2783-53.” The location number is usually repeated several times because they tend to be absurdly long and nonsensical. Then, students have to type in that location number on a Sidekick-sized keyboard in order to get on the same “page.”Annotating on the Kindle DX is a challenge, too. Instead of scrawling your thoughts and observations in the margins of a real book, you have to create a note on the Kindle. Typing in a note takes a bit longer, and it’s hard to find them later since they appear only as a superscript number next to the word in which you inserted the note.The biggest adjustment for me is the mystery of how much reading you’re supposed to do. I am a simple man: I look at the thickness of the book I’m supposed to read and plan accordingly. With the Kindle, it’s actually quite difficult to figure out how much reading you’ve been assigned because you don’t have page numbers. You can’t flip through the reading either, unless you want to click the “Next Page” button a gazillion times, wait for the lag (yes, the Kindle lags), and develop carpal tunnel syndrome.On the plus side, the Kindle DX comes with 3G internet, which, aside from receiving your e-books wirelessly, is useful for surfing the web on a terrible mobile browser. Apparently, you can also download and listen to music, but I have yet to cross that bridge.School has only been in session for a few weeks, so I’ll reserve any final judgment until I’ve used the Kindle more. Until then, I’ll continue being that kid in the library who is awkwardly clutching onto his Kindle, frozen with fear that he’ll drop it and break it into a million pieces. (It’s become a recurring nightmare.)