Kindles, the successful E-Book reader from Amazon, has grown to be so big that many big time universities are beginning to replace their old standard textbooks with this piece of fine technology. According to Macworld, school officials are happy that they are going to save 50 percent on the cost of textbooks, but does that really make sense? Let’s see, a complete set of textbooks, based on the same curriculum and a Kindle device at half price will cost close to $1,600 whereas the textbooks themselves will cost up to $2,000 but a number of problems arise when you see how hard it will be to sync the textbooks onto the device.

The Kindle’s book format doesn’t allow for easy syncing on textbooks, the browser doesn’t do anything more than give you a blinking cursor, and the note taking tool on it isn’t exactly the best. On top of all these problems, it’s not clear why colleges and universities would give up the large profit margin that they receive from textbook sales to a slim e-reader.

In case some of us forgot, the iPhone also has a Amazon E-Book reader Application. Any student that has an iPhone or an iPod Touch can view all of their work right on their device although a 3.5 inch screen isn’t preferred. The textbook market in all schools and universities nationwide makes close to 5.5 billion dollars annually and McGraw-Hill, the famous textbook supplier, has 95% of their books in electronic format. So will it eReaders become standard in the future or will Universities and students continue to shy away from the latest technology in favor of the old reliable, the textbook?