Princeton's "Toward Print-Less and Paper-Less Courses: Pilot Amazon Kindle Program" has failed to woo students and professor over to the e-reading device, the Daily Princetonian reports.

The program was announced last may to mild fanfare and tepid optimism, intended to reduce paper waste. Sponsored by the University Library and the Office of Information Technology (OIT) and funded by the High Meadows Foundation, the pilot program provided Kindle DXs to students in three select classes free of charge. All of the required readings for these courses had been loaded on the Kindles.

But after only 2 weeks, many of the 50 students who received the devices are reportedly uncomfortable and unhappy with them as a replacement for paper. Complaints centered around the ironically slow performance, inability to quickly highlight or add personal marks, the necessity to charge and general poor performance as an academic tool.

Professors and students have had to modify the way they teach, learn, and write when all the course materials were digitized on the device, and for the most part it has made their work slower and less efficient.
"I have all of my books marked up," Professor Katz said. "Either I use my own annotations, or I take the time, an immense amount of time" to annotate with the Kindle, which he finds "hard to use."

Katz also said he has little incentive to move his annotations to the Kindle, explaining that he heard the University won't use the Kindle next year. Furthermore, Kindle does not use page numbers but rather location numbers, quite useless to one who has a paper copy of a book. It is this kind of inflexibility that e-readers must surmount if they are to compete with real books in the academic realm.

Sources: Daily Princetonian