Princeton students get free Kindle DXes thanks to $30,000 grant

Princeton University is one of the half-dozen schools participating in a pilot project with Amazon over the company's new large screen Kindle DX electronic reader. The Kindle DX was unveiled last week; the reader becomes available this summer.

Princeton's chief rationale for participating: to save on printing and photocopying costs. "A driving factor in the launch of this pilot was the patterns of printing on campus," the university wrote at its website. "Statistics show that students are not reading digital articles and book selections on their computer screens, but rather downloading the same files again and again, and printing them multiple times in the course of a semester. Reasons cited for this are the fact that it is difficult to read a complex article on a computer screen, that files are printed whenever students have the opportunity to read them, and that hard copies are easier to highlight and annotate for study purposes... The e-reader pilot at Princeton seeks to target the types of readings that are most downloaded, printed, photocopied at Princeton -- which is to say the electronic and print reserve materials required for many courses -- and deliver them by means of an e-reader instead."

The e-book effort could certainly help the environment. Princeton says that 10.5 million sheets of paper were used in campus computing clusters last year, equivalent to about 100,000 reams of paper or about 5,000 trees. Overall, Princeton printed 50 million sheets of paper last year, at a cost of $5 million.

"Since the inception of digital document delivery on campus, printing has increased rather than lessened," the Ivy institution says.

Princeton also wants to study whether some of the conveniences made possible by the reader -- daily delivery of periodicals, updated RSS feeds, instant access to hundreds of thousands of titles -- prove more useful than physical books.

As part of the pilot, which starts in the fall, participating students and faculty will receive free Kindle DX readers. Princeton says it assessed several other e-readers for its pilot before choosing the DX because its display is large enough to do justice to diagrams and charts.

Princeton says none of the money to support the project is coming out of the university's operating budget. Instead, a $30,000 grant is coming from the High Meadows Foundation, an organization that hopes to support the development of environmental science and policy.

The other schools running DX pilot programs are Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Reed College, University of Virginia Darden School of Business and Pace University, site of the Manhattan press conference where Amazon's latest reader was introduced.