Hasta La Gadget!

E-readers may not be good enough for Princeton’s hallowed halls, but students and professors at Oklahoma State University seem to have fallen head over heels for their iPads. Last fall, the school introduced the tablets in a handful of lecture halls and classrooms, as part of its iPad Pilot Program. Teachers involved in the study said they benefited from all the educational software available on Apple’s App Store, while students appreciated not having to spend their life savings on traditional textbooks. At the end of the pilot program, a full 75-percent of collegians said the iPad “greatly enhanced” their classroom experience, though we’re guessing that much of that enhancement came from their newfound ability to check TweetDeck between lecture notes. Opinion was noticeably more divided, however, on the device’s value as an e-reader. Some enjoyed having all their books in one place, whereas others were a bit disappointed with the experience, saying they didn’t use it to read as often as they expected to. Our former undergrad-slacker selves can totally relate. Video and PR await you, after the break.

Continue reading Shocker! College kids like having iPads in the classroom

Shocker! College kids like having iPads in the classroom originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 May 2011 14:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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E Ink Holdings is brazenly making us wait until 2012 before producing a successor to its popular Pearl electronic paper display. One of the company’s VPs dropped into CNET‘s offices to spill the bad news: developing and testing a next-generation display “takes some time”, apparently, and it is sticking to a two year product cycle. Perhaps E Ink has shifted its focus to the LCD screen in Amazon’s rumoured tablet. Or maybe it’s still working on the Triton color e-ink display that left us so underwhelmed at CES. Either way, the monochrome Pearl has been knocking around in the Kindle and other e-readers for a while now and although it has better contrast than earlier iterations, it is still ripe for a revamp — especially a faster refresh rate. But the E Ink VP did hint at some brighter news: the next-gen display, when it does finally arrive, could sport full-motion video. So far e-ink video has failed to go beyond a slightly jittery 10-15fps, so full-motion 24fps or 30fps could definitely be worth the wait.

E Ink dashes hopes of a next gen display in 2011, but pencils in full-motion video for 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 May 2011 09:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Great news for people who love to read but wish the experience involved more advertising: an Amazon executive has announced the ad-supported Kindle, originally slated for a May 3 release, is going out to customers nearly a week early. Kindle with Special Offers, as it’s affectionately known, will ship out April 27, loaded with timely adverts from your favorite brands, including General Motors, Proctor & Gamble and Visa – those are your favorite brands, aren’t they? In exchange for sponsored screensavers and ads at the bottom of your home screen, you’ll get a latest generation WiFi-only Kindle for a only $114 – sorry, offer available in the US only. Act now, as Amazon promises it will never just give these away.

Ad-supported Kindle ships early, fans of grayscale advertising rejoice originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Apr 2011 06:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iriver Story HD e-reader hits the FCC, US retailers next? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon's Lending Library will let both Kindle owners and Kindle app users access e-book titles from their local library. Photo: Amazon.com

Sometimes you need a book, but you don’t necessarily want to buy it.

That’s what libraries were great for (remember those?). You could check out a book — say, if you needed it for a research paper, or weren’t sure if it was something you actually wanted to shell out money for — and then you return it.

Dealing with e-books has made the whole process much more simple (in general), but sometimes, you still don’t actually want to buy that e-book you’re only going to use once.

Solution: Amazon has announced that they’ll be launching a Lending Library so Kindle owners and Kindle app users can check out books from their local library.

In December, Amazon added two-week Kindle-to-Kindle lending for its users, but it required publisher approval for titles to be included in the lending program, and wouldn’t allow the e-book owner to access the title until the two-week trial was up. The Nook had a similar-style lending feature before that.

The Lending Library program will debut with over 11,000 library participants and will work with both Kindle devices and free Kindle apps. To help accomplish this, Amazon is working in partnership with a company called OverDrive, which provides access to digital content for school and public libraries.

One great feature about the program is that you’ll be able to take notes in the margins, like a real book. When your rental is up, the notes will disappear from the library’s copy because they’re stored privately. But if you check out the e-book out again, or decide to purchase it, your annotations will reappear along with any bookmarks you made.

Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library is set to launch “later this year.”

Kindle Library Lending [Amazon via RWW]