Remember the Kno dual-screen tablet we talked about earlier this year? The massive dualscreen tablet, aimed at the education market, is supposed to change the way students carry around textbooks – by eliminating textbooks altogether. The company behind the Kno has secured another boatload of funding, and the device will ship before year’s end.
I don’t think we’ll see tablets with e-books replacing textbooks for a while. Not, at least, if the US Justice Department has its say.
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/January/10-crt-030.html
I’ve taught a blind student, and I don’t quite understand why the Justice Department felt the need to step in here. Publishers of most the textbooks my university uses (our Calc book, for example) have audio editions that blind students can listen to on technologies dedicated to blind students. Maybe there’s more to the story than what I read there.
Monopoly – a game the whole country can play!
Being blind, and having also been a blind student, maybe I can help with this one.
First, both Braille and audio are nonstandard formats. I’m glad your student was able to get all their books in audio, but this is not usually the reality for most of us. To get textbooks in an accessible format (be that a pdf, doc, audio, braille, whatever) is a struggle for most of us. You have no idea how hard I had to fight with the publishers of my textbooks in college to get something I could use at all, and it took so long that I was already half way through the semester by the time I got it. If they have nothing, and refuse to give me a format I can use, you know what I then had to do? Scan it in, page by page, and rely on OCR to read. Try reading a math book, or a C++ reference, with imperfect OCR. It sucks, but it’s better than nothing. With devices like the Kindle DX, even the ability for me to OCR it should I need to would be taken away. Given Amazon’s bullshit concerning the Kindle accessibility (and I don’t hesitate to call it bs because that’s exactly what this whole situation is) I think the US government actually did the right thing for once.
I’m unsure how the DMCA exception changes this situation. On one hand, I’m now allowed to crack DRM’d ebooks if this is how I must gain access. On the other though, I guarantee that if this became the norm not only would Amazon rapidly implement a much harder DRM scheme but book publishers would do everything in their power to get this exception overturned. They aren’t interested in accessible content, not the big publishers anyway.