Yesterday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the latest entry in the Kindle family – the DX. The new larger e-book is being marketed to colleges and universities as the first e-text for higher ed. The announcement was made at one of my Alma maters, Pace University in NYC. Apparently Amazon has several colleges lined up to pilot the new device in their classrooms and lecture halls. The new Kindle comes in at nearly $500 so the colleges have indicated some interest in subsidizing the cost of the device. Read the NY Times article about the announcement.

The second big e-text news came yesterday as well as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a plan to “make California the first state in the nation to offer schools free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students.”

According to the news release on the governor’s blog:

“At the Governor’s request, Secretary Thomas will work with State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell and State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell to develop a state approved list of standards-aligned, open-source digital textbooks for high school math and science. This list will be compiled after content developers across the country are asked to and have submitted digital material for review. “

It is clear the the e-book is the future of education. The exact shape, size and format remains to be seen. But whatever the outcome, the actions of the last two day will no doubt push accessibility issues forward as both the higher education and public schools entities will require that all of these devices and materials will be accessible.

Very exciting.

~j

The Reading Rights Coalition, which represents people who cannot read print, will protest the threatened removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 outside the Authors Guild headquarters in New York City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7, 2009, from noon to 2:00 p.m. The coalition includes the blind, people with dyslexia, people with learning or processing issues, seniors losing vision, people with spinal cord injuries, people recovering from strokes, and many others for whom the addition of text-to-speech on the Kindle 2 promised for the first time easy, mainstream access to over 245,000 books. Read the whole news release on the Maine Cite website

The Reading Rights Coalition have also started their own website

~j

Image from Creative Commons license