Can you put journals on a kindle

Getting "reading copies" of books is now so easy that the e-book feels like the nail in the coffin, not a game-changer. As academics, we often read extremely specialized books printed in very short runs in places that are, in general, very far from where we live.

The Kindle really helps "long tail" readers like us because it lets you download a sample chapter, and then purchase, download, and read a new title, something that is tremendously exciting for academics, whose books often don't have a "look inside" feature on the Amazon Web site or Google Books, or wherever , and who otherwise might waste time and money getting a book shipped to them simply so they can verify whether it is worth reading or not.

In an age when our libraries are more and more cash-strapped, e-book distribution offers a lot of hope for niche publishing -- and academic publishing is nothing if not niche. Except textbooks. I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from.

Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education -- and indeed, just learning how to read closely -- means making your books part of your physical environment. In an era when you thought criminally overpriced textbooks full of uselessly pretty pictures and pre-chewed content was the absolute nadir of education, the Campus Full Of Kindles demonstrates we still have lower to sink.

If, that is, the Kindles alienate students from their libraries rather than empowering them to immerse themselves in them. And this brings us to the crux of the issue: Max Weber once remarked that scholars are the only remaining technical specialists who own their own means of production: their library.

The Kindle changes this. The Kindle is the inkjet printer of the 21st century: the business model is to give you the device for free and then charge you for refills.

Sure, the Kindle promises liberation to traveling bookworms, who can now travel without an emergency stock of extremely heavy extra reading in their bags. This space-saving feature offers even more respite for academics who find the book to oxygen ratio in their over-packed offices dangerously low. But then again, books are visible in a way e-books are not. I don't know about you, but one big consequence of developing an electric library of PDFs and book is that I forget what is in it, something that is harder to do when your books are there in the room with you, on an easily-eyeball-able shelf.

And I, at least, am reluctant to discard a book I have marked up no matter how ubiquitous replacement copies are: My markings add value to my library. We want our digital content to be open and accessible to us.

We want our underlinings and notes to transfer seamlessly from our e-book readers to our PDF collection programs to our printers, and we want to be able to mark up our content a lot this is the academic version of the "remixing" that Lawrence Lessig talks about. We want to be able to buy content from anyone -- not just Amazon -- and read it on our Kindles.

We want to be able to read journal articles on our Kindle every time a new issue of our favorite journal hits our RSS readers. Will Amazon facilitate this or will it lock the Kindle down?

In sum, while e-book readers could be an important part of our future academic reading habits, questions remain. A key to making them attractive is developing an ecosystem of scholarly information sources around them: larger libraries of scholarly books, reasonably priced, and with a firm title to ownership.

Better connections between the content repositories such as journal websites and our handheld readers, more ways to make annotations and display information. Compatibility of files across readers something that could be facilitated by adopting Open Access standards and ways to share marked up documents with our colleagues. Perhaps one thing that I don't want on my e-book reader is more bells and whistles -- the harder it is to check my email or surf the web on my reader, the more work I'm likely to get some reading done.

Until law and policy provide stronger consumer rights for people to own, rather than lease, the information they purchase, books offer a surety of title that e-books cannot replace. It is too early for academics to shift much of their workload over to e-book format -- although that day may come sooner than we expect. So if you, like me, are going to spend a lot of time traveling or just away from bookstores, it might be the time to try one of these devices. While they are not ready for prime time yet, they are still great places to outsource our pleasure reading and reference libraries.

And soon they might be good for even more. Expand comments Hide comments. We have retired comments and introduced Letters to the Editor.

Share your thoughts ». About Contact Subscribe. Kindle for the Academic. Alex Golub reviews the advantages and a few limitations, at least for now of e-book readers. By Alex Golub. November 3, Read more by Alex Golub. Inside Higher Ed Careers Hiring? Post A Job Today! Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. In a house with near 8, volumes, I used my now obsolete Sony eReader for the majority of reading for my last ms.

Portability for the train commute and exportability of notes and highlights were the main advantages. I much prefer reading in e-ink to my tablet despite using the latter for writing, though neither is as pleasurable as a real book. You can also retireve the highlighted segments. The segments are also saved on the web site. So, no chance you will delete them or lose them. I do want to switch to an e-reader for all the reasons proposed above.

The big question for me — which screens work best outdoors? I like to read outdoors, on a break from the office, or on the deck, camping, in cloudy and sunny weather.

Thanks for any help on this question! Speculative Diction Using a Kindle for academic reading Melonie Fullick explores the pros and cons of using an e-reader in her academic research. The topic of her dissertation is Canadian post-secondary education policy and its effects on the institutional environment in universities.

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