Legal Research

I have a Kindle, first generation.  In many ways, I love it ? it?s light; Kindle books are often less than half as expensive as the print kind; it saves trees; and perhaps most importantly for the impulse buyer, you can have a book as soon as you think of it.  It also has a short battery life (supposedly this is fixed in the Kindle 2) and resists casual grabbing for a few minutes? read because it has to be turned on.  It?s not instantly there to hand, and God forbid you should drop it on the hard floor of the ? you know the room. 

But the most grievous shortcomings are two-fold.  The page numbers do not correspond to those in the print version.  And when you turn to the index, there are no page numbers.  Both seem to me to stand in the way of widespread adoption of the device for use in the educational context.  If some in a class have the print version and others the Kindle version, how are they going to communicate about the text? 

There is a work-around for the index, you can find your word in the index and then use Kindle?s search function to search for it, but search doesn?t search just the book you are currently reading, it searches everything you have stored on your Kindle.  It?s very clumsy, and, compared to flipping through a print index, very time-consuming.  In an era when we are told that time constraints keeps people from reading, even these little bits of time ? waiting for the Kindle to turn on, waiting for the Kindle to turn off, painstakingly moving one by one through the fruits of your keyword search ? can add up to a reason not to turn on the Kindle and read, but to grab the paper book or magazine instead.

Don?t get the wrong idea, I don?t want Amazon to give up on the Kindle.  And if they?ve fixed the issues in the two new Kindles, I wish somebody would let me know.  Nothing I have read indicates that they have, but I?m rooting for them, because the Kindle has a lot going for it.