Academic Texts on the Kindle
Jan 31st, 2009 by Bryan
I just bought my first Kindle edition of an academic text, Christopher Seitz’s Prophecy and Hermeneutics: Toward a New Introduction to the Prophets. I read the library’s copy when it came out, but I have been motivated to read it again more carefully along with Phil Sumpter’s review series on it. I figured I would buy it this time, and was delighted to see that Baker Academic has made it available on the Kindle. Hooray for Baker! Having it on the Kindle means that I can
- carry it with me everywhere
- easily highlight passages and find them later
- search the volume for key terms
- make notes to myself on the keyboard
- be the cool professor reading his Kindle (ha ha, as if)
I have had a Kindle since last June, but except for the NRSV Bible and my own dissertation, I haven’t used it much for reading academic texts. I have read about twice as much fiction as I normally do, however, including some giant tomes such as Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and Stephen King’s The Stand. Those are books that I would normally have kept by the bed rather than carry them around with me. With the Kindle I burned through them much faster than possible with the dead-tree versions.
Which brings me back to academic reading. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but a lot of the books we read are big and heavy. I am so glad to have an office now because I have a convenient place to keep books. Back in the grad school days I was forever lugging around books like Huehnergard’s Akkadian grammar and Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament [1400 pages between them]. I eagerly await the time, coming soon I believe, when most of the academic resources we need are available electronically. And if they are available electronically, I will most likely be able to put them on my Kindle (or my next Kindle?).
If you know of other useful academic texts available electronically, put them in the comments or send them to me and I will start an index page. [Edit: Of course, Jim West's Biblical Studies Resources page is the first place to start. Some of these could be converted for Kindle use, and some could not.]
Also, for more on this topic see my post on the Paperless Academic, and then the update after I bought my Kindle.
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Who spots an intact wooden pallet and concludes they're looking at the wreckage of a modern-day airplane? Did they really think an entire plane (made out of metal) was destroyed, but a fragile wooden pallet somehow emerged from the crash unscathed?Thanks for the tip on Seitz’s book. Just bought it for my Kindle.
Last semester, three of my books for classes were available on the Kindle and this semester, there are eight. The number of more “non-popular” books seems to be going up month after month.
In general, I’ve had a good experience with books on the Kindle (or using the Olive Tree and BibleXpress’ translation apps on the Touch) in class. We do have the occasional professor who doesn’t allow the use of laptops, so I have to get “Kindle clearance” before the semester for those types.
The one exception was my experiment with a Kindle text for Greek II (Croy’s Primer of Biblical Greek). While great in theory, Greek II on the Kindle was a fail.
Otherwise, I can’t recommend academic texts on the Kindle enough for the reasons you point out. The pure joy of not having to lug around heavy texts from my car to the Div School and back again coupled with the ability to make (and send) notes assuages my anxiety about not having a physical “hard copy” of a Brueggemann text!
Sam
You know, Brueggemann’s Theology has been available digitally for a number of years now in Logos.
Thanks for the comments. Sam, what are the seminary books that are available on the Kindle? I’m curious about what you’re reading, as well as interested in the e-book angle.
Mike, you raise a great point about the electronic “libraries.” I put a lot of money into Bibleworks modules when I was on Windows/Linux, and am now busy adding things to my Accordance library on OS X. It seems to me that these library systems are best for three things: 1) biblical texts and commentaries, 2) reference works, and 3) books that you tend to read in small doses, as for devotional reading. Most recently, I bought the Context of Scripture and the Anchor Bible Dictionary. I love being able to do searches from the Bible into these reference works, and to copy/paste quotes into my word processor.
For books that I want to sit down and read, I would rather have a more portable format. The best thing would be an un-DRM’ed PDF file that I could read on the screen, print, or put on the Kindle. Second best is an e-book that works with my device. Having a work like that trapped in a library on my computer is not ideal. Someone might use Brueggemann as a reference or devotional work, but personally I would rather have it as a PDF. [It is not currently available as an e-book anywhere, to my knowledge.]
Well, the nice thing about the Logos edition of Brueggemann is that it actually came with the paperback version of the physical book, which means you can always use the “real thing.” And of course there always the ability to “print to pdf” a chapter you’re reading and send it to Kindle.
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Oh, that’s very nice that they gave you an electronic version with the book. They weren’t doing that when I bought the hardcover. I really wish that all publishers would do something similar.
After your comment I explored the various exporting features in Accordance. You can copy/paste up to 500 verses or paragraphs, and do a “save as text file” for up to 1000 verses or paragraphs. However, as you suggest, one can print the whole thing to a PDF. I printed the Anchor Bible Dictionary as a PDF (15,000 pages!, 34 megabytes). The program warned me about copyright but otherwise it worked fine. I then split the first 1000 pages off into their own PDF and loaded it onto the Kindle. I imagine that this violates my license for ABD, but in this case having the “library” version is better than a Kindle version because in effect you get both, and more. I’m not distributing the file, which is what copyright is supposed to police, in any case.
In my opinion publishers ought to encourage this sort of thing. It would make people feel much better about getting their money’s worth in buying books.