So Princeton arranged for fifty students to get free Kindle DXs with their course material for the semester already loaded on 'em. Apparently, most of them don't like 'em.
One point of dissatisfaction was that the texts couldn't be marked up; I'm kind of against marking books permanently, but there are some books I wedge paper bookmarks between the pages of or add sticky labels to. It's just easier. (I will admit to having a couple of books on my shelf used for research with hiliter marks. Gasp.) I didn't even think of this when I thought about having e-textbooks, and it's a big advantage of the physical textbook. There's also a thing I do where I will try to recognize text by sidebars or illustrations; when I'm not sure where the stuff I'm looking for is at and it's not very conveniently in the index, I'll flip through quickly. It also helps when I can see how close to the beginning or end of the book I am. There are visual cues that would be much harder on an e-reader.
Can this be overcome? Probably, though I think I'll never feel as comfortable with an e-textbook as I do with a hard copy. Maybe younger people could do it more easily, though I consider myself fairly young and technologically inclined. Do Kindles allow you to see the text of two books at once or flip between them easily?
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