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Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

Very short summary:

- with the iPad you can do interactive books which are basically the new "interactive CDROM" you had some years ago. - with the Kindle you cannot easily flip through the pages and write notes on them, this is why it does not improve the traditional textbook.

Nothing new, you know that after 15 minutes using the devices. But I must say, to read novels, news and stuff like that, you cannot really be better than the Kindle at the moment.

Disclaimer: I am an avid user of my Kindle combined with Instapaper.

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… basically the new "interactive CDROM" …

I don’t think that’s a fair description. Why were interactive CDs so horrible? Well, you needed this huge clunky machine (the wall of screens between teacher and students) which takes ages to start, you need to find the damn CD and you need to wait forever until the program is loaded. Oh, and that whole interaction thing with the mouse was very clunky. [+]

The new tablets are small, lightweight, you don’t have to boot them up and apps load practically instantly.

I wouldn’t be too dismissive of them. They are a far cry from the old experience. It still might not work but I don’t think it’s enough to say “Oh, just like the old CD-ROMs!” and leave it at that.

[+] To be fair, I think that horribly production values had also something to do with it. That’s something new devices can’t remedy but I think we are a lot more experienced and have better tools today. The technology and our knowledge is more mature.

I am not dismissive, but writing scientific publications is really a hard work. Really hard work, even in black and white with just a few illustrations and tables.

So, I do think that we will be able to get wonderful tablet based text books, but it will be for main stream topics (most likely all the undergraduate stuff, like the Feynman books in physics) and not cutting edge.

This is why I put them at the "interactive CDROM" level, in the sense that it will be available for topics which were covered with these CDROM.

On a side note, I really hope people will produce a lot of good content for the tablets and make the content available for not a lot of money. The more we get people to know what is science, what we do as scientists, how we try to reason on problems and argue with data and theories based on data, the better the world will be.

> basically the new "interactive CDROM" you had some years ago.

And I still kind of think that was a solution in search of a problem. Are there any evidence that stuff like that helps learning?

The idea behind them was to remove the work involved in learning and the effort required to teach.

In exercise you cannot get strong without effort, and there is no way to learn without effort.

The most effective way to teach someone and to learn is with a teacher, blackboard, and chalk. Everything else is second best (including the wonderful Kahn Academy).

I'm looking into getting a Kindle and I knew all you said before I've even picked one up. Perhaps it's only amongst us HNers, but this was a given fact for me before ever taking hold of the device.

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