At least one university in Wisconsin is taking a turn for the worse in trying to be more tech savvy.

Twenty UW-Madison students are using Amazon Kindles instead of regular textbooks, according to http://www.todaystmj4.com. The Kindle is an electronic reading device which allows people to connect wirelessly to Amazon and download e-books straight onto their Kindles. Students who like the Kindle praise it for being lighter and more concise than textbooks, as well as environmentally friendly. The high cost of traditional textbooks is prompting many students in various universities to push for technology-based alternatives, as Heny Rashwan cites in his column on thelantern.com.

I am a nerd when it comes to books. When most little girls watch Disney movies, they want Ariel’s voice or Cinderella’s glass slippers. I wanted Belle’s gigantic library with the ladders stretched to the ceiling. While I would never want electronic reading devices like the Kindle to completely replace traditional books, I can appreciate the benefits they might have for students.

However, these devices simply are not worthwhile replacements. First-hand experience provided me with a hefty list of reasons why the Kindle is impractical and inefficient.

The price for a Kindle is $299. Then you have to purchase all the books that you want on it–if you can find them in Amazon’s virtual Kindle store. Most of the books are bestsellers and recent titles. If you want to read the latest Charlaine Harris vampire thriller, you’re set. But if your tastes lean toward the intellectual, you might find yourself out of luck. And while there is a slight reduction in price for an e-book compared to a printed book, it is not substantial enough to make up for the device’s $300 price tag, especially when you consider its faults.

The Kindle is slow and occasionally freezes. My first Kindle froze permanently within a week and had to be replaced. The more I read, the slower it gets– eminiscent of my parents’ old, virus-ridden computer. Students today have enough trouble with computers crashing and losing their half-typed papers; why add in the trouble of being left without textbooks? And although the Kindle sports a keyboard for typing notes, this feature, too, is slow and cumbersome. The time it takes for me to highlight, type and save is frustrating and limiting. I want to scratch down a thought and go on with my reading and analyzing, not waste two or three minutes fiddling with my Kindle.

But the biggest reason the Kindle is impractical is that you can’t flip through pages. In fact, you are not even afforded the luxury of page numbers. A small number at the bottom of the screen tells you that you are 17 percent through the book, but 17 percent can last for six or seven pages. And if you’re 60 percent of the way through the book and want to reference something back in the vague area of 13 percent, you have to scroll backwards until you reach it, then scroll forward, back to 60 percent. The only way around this is if your book happens to have a chapter feature or if you bookmark every single passage of any importance, just in case that topic comes up again later in the book. Even then, the process is time consuming. Compare this to holding one finger on page 160 while you flip back to page 79.

The Kindle is too slow, unreliable and inefficient for any comprehensive reader. A much better solution to high textbook prices is to work on enacting more rental systems like UW-Platteville offers. It’s true that our system is not perfect, but I would much rather rent my books and retain the option of buying those I want, than tote them around on a faulty little device where they were all be erased at the end of the semester. Plus, effective rental systems and encouraging publishers to consider recycled paper will assist in the environmentally-friendly department. Really, there is no reason for us to resort to the Kindle.