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I’ve reported about the Kindle more than a few times in this blog and have been generally fascinated by e-reader technology. I keep predicting it is the next big thing and with the pending announcement coming from the creatives in Cupertino, we may have another e-reader in the mix very soon.

That said, the e-reader, and specifically the Kindle by Amazon, has been having a rough time of it. First introduced in November of 2007, the Kindle was a big hit, selling out in the first five hours and on backorder for months after that. The Kindle 2, released two years later was equally well received and the DX version released a couple of months later was also very popular.

Then the fun began. A controversy with The Author’s Guild forced Amazon to hobble the Kindle 2 by shutting off the text-to-speech feature. Disability groups stormed the Manhattan offices of The Author’s Guild to protest and claim discrimination, but the device, it seems, was already inherently inaccessible to people with disabilities.

In May of 2009, Amazon announced a bold move of a offering the Kindles to several large US universities with the goal of taking over the college textbook industry and making paper college textbooks a thing of the past. More fun followed when the inherent inaccessibility of the device became widely known. A number of the  universities that piloted the program with the Kindle backtracked and dropped out when they started to see the accessibility problems. “Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, also examined the utility of the Kindle DX as a teaching device and decided that they would not use the Kindle DX until it is accessible to blind individuals” – this according to the US Department of Justice (USDOJ).

The latest news on Kindle is a settlement with the USDOJ announced this week. It states:

Under the agreements reached today, the universities (Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Reed College, and Arizona State University) generally will not purchase, recommend or promote use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision. The universities agree that if they use dedicated electronic book readers, they will ensure that students with vision disabilities are able to access and acquire the same materials and information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. The agreements that the Justice Department reached with these universities extend beyond the Kindle DX to any dedicated electronic reading device.

This sounds pretty bad for Amazon and the Kindle.

And given Mr. Jobs recent efforts at making Apple products fully accessible, one can only imagine that the rumored “Apple Table device” WILL be fully accessible and perfectly timed to kick butt.

Stay tuned.

With much fanfare a few months ago, Amazon.com rolled out its latest version of Kindle, the e-book appliance that they hoped would revolutionize the industry. At the time, close to the beginning of the school year, Amazon also announced that several “major” universities in the US would be “testing” the Kindle as a way of inexpensively delivering college text to college students.

In the meantime, Kindle has also been embroiled in a debate between consumers who have disabilities and the association that represents writers, The Authors’ Guild. Central in that debate was copyright issues and whether having a text to speech conversion tool built into Kindle’s operating system would be a violation of the copyright rules. More on that story.

But the Kindle story took a new twist when two of the “major universities”  rejected the Kindle because – get this – “the menus of the device are not accessible to the blind”

Reported widely in the press, both Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have decided to say, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the Kindle.

E-Access Bulletin reports,

The institutions’ decision was “applauded” by the US National Federation of the Blind ( NFB: http://bit.ly/gBnAC ), which said that although the reader contains a text-to-speech feature, “the menus of the device are not accessible to the blind”, meaning that blind users cannot purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select which book to read, or even activate the device’s text-to-speech feature.

They further state,

“If e-books are accessible, then there will be no need for the expensive and time- consuming process of converting a printed textbook into Braille, audio, or electronic form. Blind students will have access to the same book at the same time and at the same price as their sighted peers”, said Chris Danielsen, director of public relations for the NFB.

Danielsen said that Amazon could increase the accessibility of the Kindle DX by “making the menus speak and/or by allowing the functions of the device to be controlled by keystrokes from the keyboard.”

Read the full article on E-Access Bulletin.

Perhaps because Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California gave it some broad public attention, or perhaps it is a sign of the times, but it seems not a day goes by that there is not another news story about digital textbooks. Since my concerns are related to the accessibility of the media and the medium, I have been reading all that I can.

Here are some of the latest stories, just in case you are interested.

California names first digital textbooks that meet standards for high school math, science

Online textbooks offered free to students

U.S. company to offer digital textbooks on iPhone

Students’ textbooks might soon be a thing of the past: Virtual books could be turning the page on modern education

Digital textbooks may soon take over for paper predecessors

And so it goes…

~j

Wow, two stories around the internet this week have to do with digital books in the educational arena.

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

I just finished reading a blog entry on the E-Access Bulletin about efforts to force Amazon to shut off the text-to-speech feature of the new Kindle 2 e-book reader. It seems certain publishers want additional “audio royalties” for providing what they see as a “audiobook.”

I know things are tough financially all over, but this seems pretty mercenary to me. Personally, I see a big difference between a mechanized text-to-speech reading application and audiobooks where the content is usually read by a compentent actor or perhaps by the author themselves. The richness of that experience is very different from the “computer voice. ”

It also seems to me that the publishing industry is running scared in light of what has happened to the recording industry and the Napster fiasco. They really need to put their heads together and come up with a plan to get into the game or they will simply dematerialize. Challenging every new innovation is not a solution and will only leave a bitter taste in the mouths of many consumers.

The text-to-speech features of Kindle 2 are a wonderful and universally designed element making printed materials much more available to persons with print disabilities. They should be rewarded and not punished.

Read the whole blog entry from E-Access Bulletin

UPDATE: Just read this additional blog entry from TechFlash about this controversy. Note the comments from the Authors’ Guild disputing some of the commentary.

National Federation of the Blind is into this – see press release. And see “KindleBoards.”

Some twittering about a protest in NYC on 4/7/09. Will post more when I know.

~j