Thursday, May 7, 2009

Amazon Kindle @ Darden

Amazon Chooses Darden as First Business School to Use the Kindle was today's article title in businessweek. 
"You might have heard word yesterday that a select number of universities had been selected to participate in Amazon’s new Kindle school initiative. What you probably didn’t know is that one of those universities is a top business school." reads the article.

The new Kindle will be used as of next fall (lucky class of 2011) in and outside of class. 
This is a great initiative in terms of sustainability not to mention convenience. As an avid technologist, I've already been using the V1 Kindle since it first came out. It's been very helpful this year when Darden gave us a choice of using online PDFs rather than acres of cut forests. It's great and convenient on the treadmill and would be even better with the text to speech feature. The only disadvantage so far was that the conversion of PDFs was not up for the challenge of graphics. Hopefully now, with the native PDF support, that would not be an obstacle anymore.

Hopefully, Amazon and Darden would take the extra step and provide it to current students as well as provide all of our cases in e-format so we could save more trees and make my room less of a mess.

If we calculate the printing expenses saved over 2 years and add the value of this CSR to sustainability, I'm pretty sure it's worthwhile to provide us all with Kindles.

8 comments:

MechaniGal said...

I love the idea!! Love it love it love it!

Sania said...

Definitely hearing you on this being a less-mess solution! I have cases everywhere...

Elad Ganot said...

Kindle rocks!

Greg Little said...

Did they tell you that it will be us (Class of 2011) assigned to use the Kindle? In the articles I read, it just says:

The School’s goal is to make the device available to two groups of students in the fall. Plans call for one "group" from the School’s full time MBA program and another "group" in its MBA for Executives program to receive, test, and assess the Kindle DX.

How do you know that it won't be second years assigned to the Kindle? If you are sure that it is first years, does this "group" entail all first years, or just some random selection of "lucky" first years?

Oren said...

Greg,
Amazon will give 300 Kindles to 6 schools, so probably 50 will go to our school. They'll be used by exec MBAs and full times. As far as we've been told it would be for first years. So it would seem you have about 8% probability to get one next year.
I recommend buying one anyway. Useful things for a heavy reading program like ours.

MechaniGal said...

Hey Oren! Trust the summer's treating you well... Missing you on the blogosphere. S.

PS. funnily, the word verification is lessaid (less-said) :D

Unknown said...

Just wondering if you'd be willing to share your resume and gpa/GMAT that warranted your acceptances and "dings" at the programs you applied to... Shoot me an email if you don't mind, please!

JulyDream said...

Dude... you disappeared!!

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