And, it looks like we’ve pretty much busted the myth of the paperless syllabus/course! Books are so much more convenient than a huge stack of paper…

I’ve been thinking about replacing my anthology with articles available in the online course space, because of how I use it (each is required to read and work with some of it, but not all of it). It would also be nice to have a variety of articles that I can switch around. After comments here, though, I need to more closely consider this!

Then again, one of the reasons I love it is cause I’m traveling tons, not in a country with affordable books, so perhaps I love it more than I would in the U.S. But I doubt it. Immediate gratification is often my BFF.

As to how it works…great for those us going blind. By adjusting the font size I could read comfortably again! I thought pleasure reading was a thing of the past as a result of my job (kind of like becoming a prostitute) but then found out the problem was my eyesight, not the job. I got a new optometrist.

The other good part is that books in the public domain are free or 99 cents, so that I have downloaded a lot of 18th and 19th cent novels and can travel with them. (Poetry doesn’t transfer very well.) The other night I wanted to read a slave narrative that I don’t have in print, and I pulled it up on the Kindle for free.

Would I do it again? Definitely not without the gift certificate. But a few more good impulse reads might make it worth while. For those considering it, I recommend trying one out to see if you like it before spending the money.

2) For ugrads, I offer them an extra credit point (they love that, though it is worth almost nothing) if they bring printouts or show me downloaded PDFs of all the articles the first weeks of class. This, I think, ups the likelihood that they don’t skip readings when they aren’t easily accessible that week. I agree — any impediment to doing the work decreases the likelihood they do it.

3) This greatly reduces costs for students — a ugrad coursepack costs under $50, and grad students pay under $20 to copy the excerpts they can’t get online. Now, with scanning, I’m hopeful I can reduce that even more.

4) FYI: I’m a HUGE fan of the Kindle. No, it isn’t perfect, but I much prefer reading it to paper most days. I can search for key terms, carry my books anywhere, and you CAN annotate it (not the best keyboard in the world, but then you have a text file of annotations, as opposed to a book with chicken scratches in it). Can’t wait till more academic presses make their books accessible on it.

If it’s a question of a textbook, even an anthology, they want the physical book. Many of these are available in looseleaf, cheaper because they are unbound, and non resalable for that reason. And you can just carry around a chapter if you want your backpack to be light. I won’t assign a textbook or an anthology if I do not intend to actually use most of it.