"To make matters worse, he says the Kindle proved unable to keep up with the class discussion — it would take half a minute to load a page and by then, the discussion would have lost its momentum."
So wrong. Page-at-a-time is the /only/ way you use textbooks during class in higher ed. You're expected to have already done the reading before class; you don't /read/ the textbook during a classroom discussion. You use it to shore up an argument (see the proof on page XX) or visualize a point (see the diagram on page YY).
If the Kindle doesn't handle random seek well, it's no better than a textbook in that regard (textbooks also fail at random seek).
I wonder if this is referring to the "unique" way the Kindle has of referring to locations in a text. You can't just tell it to "go to page 10" but instead have to give it some rather odd looking location such as 1768-79.
1/2 a minute? That isn't how long it takes me.