Earlier today I asked why the University of Washington wasn't included on the announced list of universities testing the new Amazon Kindle DX as a textbook replacement for students. Well, as it turns out, the UW has joined the party. Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair of Computer Science & Engineering at UW, tells me his department and the UW's Foster School of Business will be testing the Kindle DX this fall.

Lazowska didn't specify how many students would get Kindles, but expressed enthusiasm about the possibilities of Amazon's new large-screen e-reader, which comes with a built-in PDF support.

"Each of our incoming students prints a thousand pages of stuff from the web and then has to tote this stuff around and recycle it," Lazowska said. "Suppose instead they had to print nothing and all this stuff was available on the Kindle?"

He added: "We can gain a huge amount of convenience for students and save a lot of trees."

When Amazon unveiled the Kindle DX on May 6, it said six universities would take part in a pilot project to test the device: Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College, Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and Pace University. But the University of Washington, in Amazon's own backyard, was notably absent from the list, as we pointed out in this post earlier today.

I asked Lazowska why UW wasn't part of the initial pilot group and he said, "It's really complicated." Asked what his reaction was when the Kindle DX and the pilot program were announced, Lazowska said: "I said, 'Hey, why aren't we a part of this?' And the answer in very short order was, 'You are.' "

Others had also noted UW's absence from the Kindle DX pilot.

"Okay Amazon, we're a digital media program in your backyard, with students and advisory bd. members employed by you: why no Kindle DX's?" tweeted Hanson Hosein, director of the UW's Master of Communication in Digital Media program, shortly after the new Kindle was announced.

Asked for comment, Amazon spokeswoman Cinthia Portugal said, "We do not disclose information on discussions with current or potential partners."

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has some strong connections to UW as a donor. The University of Washington Press, for its part, has been dabbling with publishing e-books for the Kindle. 

Princeton University has said a small number of classes in the fall will use the new Kindle for their course materials. Students and faculty involved in the project will receive free Kindles, and the project is being funded by a $30,000 gift from the High Meadows Foundation (the Kindle DX is currently priced at $489). Princeton has set up a website to track the e-reader project, and makes clear this is an effort to cut costs:

Last year, Princeton printed 50 million sheets of paper at the cost of $5 million. Over 10 million sheets were printed in student computing clusters, much of that generated by printing digitzed text. If, through the use of e-readers, we can cut down that printing by even 1%, we will have more than made up for what was spent on this pilot.

Princeton is Jeff Bezos' alma mater.

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