CBJ: UVa business school among Kindle testers

First-year graduate students at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration are giving mixed reviews of the Kindle DX, an electronic book reader that they’re testing this school year.

Darden was the only business school selected for the trial program, which includes several universities. Amazon’s one-pound, centimeter-thick device currently being tested is the third iteration of the device first introduced in 2006. Amazon wants feedback on the latest version, which is already on the market, to improve future versions.

Several Darden students said their Kindles are useful for tasks such as reading and highlighting text passages in the hundreds of case studies that form the basis of their curriculum. But for analyzing numeric data and doing quantitative work, the students must instead use their laptop computers.

The 62 students in the class of 2011’s Section D received their Kindles wrapped in blue-and-orange UVa covers at the start of the school year in mid-August. A handful of users gave the Associated Press preliminary critiques of the device, and also plan to give Amazon similar feedback.

Utz Meyer, 25, from Germany, said the Kindle eliminates the need to carry stacks of case studies, and he has all his required cases with him in the device, so he doesn’t have to think about which ones to pull for class. The Kindle can display a summary of his markups with its “My Clippings” function, giving him a sort of “executive outline” of each case’s important points, he said.

However, the Kindle isn’t a tool for crunching numbers in spreadsheets, required for most of the nearly 300 cases a typical first-year Darden student will study by the end of the year.

“I think that such a device cannot replace a laptop in the short run, and it is not aimed at doing this,” Meyer said. “So the Kindle is competing against the use of printed paper, and is in my opinion the winner of that competition.”

Mervyn Han, 26, of San Francisco, says the Kindle is becoming an increasingly effective study device as he learns how to use it, but he still wonders whether it’s better for the environment than printed documents.

“I’ve heard Amazon claiming in the media that the Kindle uses very little electricity, but I find myself charging up the Kindle every day,” Han said in an e-mail. “It would be great if somebody - and I guess we Darden students could do this - would compare the carbon footprint of the two media types.”

Michael Koenig, director of Darden’s MBA operations and the Kindle testing coordinator, said students have made him aware of the shortcomings, and a focus group with Amazon representatives is scheduled for early November.

“What I’m hearing: It’s a reading device, fundamentally,” Koenig said. “You can’t do the calculations and spreadsheets.”

Koenig also noted that student testers have been told that if the Kindle gets in the way of studying to “put it aside and get prepared for your class, then come back to it when you can.”

Koenig described Section D as a representative cross-section of Darden’s first-year students. Students in the section have had varying work experiences and are divided evenly among three undergraduate backgrounds: engineering and other “hard” sciences; business and economics; and arts and sciences and other majors, Koenig said.

Darden officials knew student users would range from those who have worked at technology companies to those who adore hardcover books and have a visceral negative reaction to reading on a Kindle.

Liz Brower, 25, of Crested Butte, Colo., said that she uses both her Kindle and printed reading materials. She said that if the device had a split screen where she could refer to a body of text and a data table at the same time, along with a stylus to take mathematical notes, she might be able to do away with paper.

Several students also have said a touch screen would be helpful.

The first-year Darden students also say the Kindle test is intriguing from a business standpoint, and they’re interested to see how Amazon takes the feedback and uses it to develop its next-generation Kindle as an educational tool.

Han says he thinks there’s a large potential for the Kindle in higher education, but Amazon needs to know when such a device would be useful, such as literature or other non-technical texts, and when it wouldn’t work as well.

“I’m actually surprised that they have not been more aggressive in seeking feedback so far,” he said. “If I was on a product team that had committed capital to a pilot, I’d be eager to collect data ASAP - especially to understand the initial phase where students are facing, and hopefully overcoming, barriers to use.”