Last year Princeton ran a pilot program with Amazon’s Kindle DX and 50 students in three courses all of the material they’d need on the 9.7-inch eReader as an experiment in paper vs ePaper textbooks. A good idea in theory, but not as useful as many hoped in practice. One of the major complaints students and professors had was how the DX limited their interactions with the text.

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes,” complained Aaron Horvath to the Daily Princetonian. His professor, Stan Katz, agreed that this approach is key for how he teaches the course. “I require a very close reading of texts. I encourage students to mark up texts, and … I expect them to underline and to highlight texts.”

The DX does include an annotation feature, however students found it less than ideal for their purposes. One student felt that it wasn’t as “organic” as taking notes on paper, and another described the device as clunky and slow.

The criticism none of the students or professors made was about the screen itself. One even noted that it made reading for long periods of time easier compared to computer screens. This is good news because it shows that the basic technology — the e-Ink screen — is doing its job. It’s the rest of the device that needs some work.

At CES, I got to see and play with several eReaders with screens ranging from 8 – 11 inches. Unlike smaller readers that are focused on the consumption of popular fiction and non-fiction books, these readers are aimed at users who need to not only read but interact with the text on the screen. And right now the two markets vendors have their sights on are business and education.

Let’s take a look at the advantages eReaders like the Plastic Logic Que, Entourage eDGe, and the Skiff have over the Kindle DX and how their feature sets may overcome the hurdles those Princeton students and professors got tangled up in.

More Than Just Books

Large-screen eReaders are great for reading books, but the point of the larger screen is to present other content, such as periodicals,В more effectively. Many magazines and newspapers are taking steps to keep up with the move toward digital reading which has resulted in a wave of new delivery systems to go along with the multitude of readers popping up.

Hearst Publications announced a major initiative at CES with the introduction of the Skiff eReader and Skiff content service. By bringing magazines and newspapers into the digital publishing space with not only layout intact but also added features such as interactive ads and other media elements to enhance the reading experience.

I’m a fan of this idea and definitely glad to hear that the Skiff service will be available on other devices. So far the Skiff eReader appears to be focused on the periodical reading aspect and not other added functions like dealing with documents. However, it does have a touchscreen and is still in development, so those features may be coming.

Plastic Logic’s Que has its own content partnerships with magazines and newspapers and also offers the full-layout reading experience. Even in greyscale, the graphical elements of magazines present much as they do on the printed page. Magazine covers on the Que rendered really well. And though I’m sure art directors everywhere will chafe against the loss of color, the users who will read magazines on their eReader are likely already sold on the title already and aren’t the newsstand browsers eye-catching covers are meant to attract.

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