<p>Is it possible to buy your textbooks as ebooks? I feel like it would be a lot more convenient to have my textbooks on an ipad or kindle as opposed to carrying around the physical book.</p>
<p>my books rarely left my room, it’s not like HS where you had to bring your textbooks to every class. i don’t think there was ever an instance i had to bring a hardcover textbook to a lecture. (obviously, paperbacks for lit/writing classes are the exception)</p>
<p>i have a kindle, but i couldn’t imagine putting my textbook on it. cross-referencing is pretty much impossible, and flipping between different sections in the book isn’t exactly easy either.</p>
<p>Yeah no one really does the ebook/ipad thing. Occasionally you’ll have readings on e-reserves so you read them on a computer but most everything is still in print. And agreed with everything astrina said, you never have to bring your textbooks anywhere.</p>
<p>I’ve also heard about sites that provide e-books being very inconvenient in terms of letting you annotate important information… they have highlighting features that barely work. Or they may have none at all. It’s just much easier to buy the real thing :)</p>
<p>just read this article and thought it’d be a worthy addition to the discussion:</p>
<p>Ten Reasons Not to Buy a Kindle 2
- It’s bad for research. I’m working on a book right now and I wanted to use the Kindle for all of my research. Sadly, this is almost impossible. The book is a physical object – you can move through it, skimming for notes and important points – and there is something in our education that gives us a sense of space inside a book. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but you know how you can pick up a book and show someone what you’re looking for in a few page turns? You know it was halfway through, maybe a third of the way down the page, and it was near another set of words. The Kindle is not conducive to that kind of mental map-making… yet.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>It’s horrible for reference. Don’t buy a Kindle of you just read programming manuals. Programming manuals offer something different. While it seems counterintuitive that a document you can search programatically wouldn’t be good as reference material, you’re better off looking up function calls on a website and using the physical book as a guide to building your programs. This is a corallary of point 1, above, so this could change.</p></li>
<li><p>The Kindle is flimsy. You’ll go through your day thinking you will break your Kindle. You don’t fit that much screen on a thin device that is meant to be thrown into a bag without a care and not risk cracking it. There will come a day when you open your bag and see that your Kindle is dead, even in its case. It’s not your fault. Say it with me: it’s not your fault.</p></li>
<li><p>It’s not ready for students. Add points 1, 2, and 3 together and you come to the conclusion that this is not ready for students. This may be a good device for English classes requiring lots of long novel reading, but as an education tool it isn’t quite there.</p></li>
<li><p>The net connection doesn’t work internationally. For some reason last year I was convinced the Kindle had Wi-Fi built-in. I was trying to get on the Internet in Warsaw, Poland and I kept looking for that Wi-Fi button. Then I remembered – no Wi-Fi. And I cried. How I cried, my friends. Then I downloaded the Kindle book onto my desktop and dragged it over via the USB cable. So that’s, in essence, your international solution.</p></li>
<li><p>No SD slot. While the Kindle can easily hold 1,500 books, what if you’re the kind of person who likes to keep everything in its right place? Maybe you want to make a book playlist? Maybe you have 1,501 books? I don’t know. Sadly, the Kindle doesn’t allow for memory expansion. Not a big deal, but to some it’s a bad thing.</p></li>
<li><p>Flight attendants will tell you to turn it off on take off and landing. You can’t explain that it’s epaper and uses no current. You just can’t. It’s like explaining heaven to bears.</p></li>
<li><p>It contains a battery. Remember, Reader, the Kindle is mortal. It will die on you when you don’t have your charger.</p></li>
<li><p>It’s bottom heavy. The internal battery makes the device want to plop face down on your chest. I read it last night when I was sleepy and it kept getting ready to fall on me.</p></li>
<li><p>There’s just something about a dead tree book, isn’t there? It’s nice to pop into the airport news stand and pick up a novel. It just is. I’m sorry.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>[10</a> reasons to buy a Kindle 2… and 10 reasons not to](<a href=“http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/02/25/10-reasons-to-buy-a-kindle-2-and-10-reasons-not-to/]10”>http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/02/25/10-reasons-to-buy-a-kindle-2-and-10-reasons-not-to/)</p>
<p>(but textbook discussion aside, i love the kindle. the ipad is cool too, but there’s no point in having a huge ipod touch when you already have an iphone. plus the lit screen is the same idea as staring at a computer screen all day.)</p>
<p>Trust me. You won’t be carrying your textbooks anywhere.</p>