Should the blind keep students from using Kindles?

Great Debates
1

In today’s Wall Street Journal (and repeated many other places for those of you with a WSJ phobia), I learned that 4 universities have agreed not to promote the use of the Kindle for education since the blind can’t use it.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/government/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222300989

Now, on first read I am furious. E-books provide the chance to break the monopoly of the reader and textbook providers, making it easier for faculty to assemble .pdf materials for student use. I foresee a future of e-books in the classroom for all materials, with minor annual updates.

However - killing the experiment because of ADA compliance? This is the type of crap that makes me start losing my support for disabled activists. However - I don’t want to pit. Please help me with my relaxation techniques and state why this lawsuit was necessary and needed. Couldn’t the universities just agree to ensure that braille readers are kept available?

2

Doesn’t the Kindle 2 have a text to speech function? It has to be allowed by the publisher. Some authors hate cutting into the lucrative books on tape market, but I doubt that textbooks have much of one.

3

How blind-accessible are traditional textbooks?

4

How is this true?

5

Of course, but ultra liberal people like to create some imaginary harmed person and change what everyone else wants, just for him. Even if he is not real. I mean they will stop oil drilling claiming bears will not enjoy being in the arctic anymore, and silly stuff like that.

It is also possible some company with rights/patents to a good braille reader made some donations so that if adopted, guess whose readers would get bought? Just a thought based on how America works.

6

Readers are pricey, and don’t last long. Some faculty have begun experimenting with writing their own online textbooks, but students have requested that they be printed. While digital printing presses are more available, the binding options don’t stand up to the typical college abuse.

I see ebooks giving a format that makes it easier for faculty to start putting together more “reader” type materials, but not in the $85 crappy coil or tape bound format. A textbook for your syllabus could be assembled, instead of needing to buy the 11th edition at $150 for the full color printing in hard back.

7

Why would putting something in digital format obviate the need to purchase it? The whole point of the Kindle is that Amazon controls access rights and can enforce copyrights. If anything, that will lead to an elimination of the resale market and an overall driving-up of the costs of course materials.

Right now you have a textbook monopoly that charges very high prices, but you also have used old editions available with largely the same content for peanuts, and lots of professors who are willing to scan or copy things in a basically illegal manner because they don’t wish to participate in the current pricing structure. Moving away from physical media will eliminate the last two loopholes and do nothing to solve the original problem. And, as you allude to, there’s still the matter of the $300 Kindle and the fact that most people find reading lengthy chunks of text in digital format to be a pain in the ass.

8

Hopefully people took the time to actually read the linked article. It states clearly:

"The Kindle DX has a text-to-speech feature to make content accessible to the visually impaired. However, the device does not include a similar function for the menu and navigational controls, making it impossible for blind students to find content or access the device’s other functions, the DOJ said. "

If you’ve got ten textbooks loaded in your Kindle and you’re blind there is no way to navigate between the books, which makes it pretty tough on you. If that’s the only way that the textbooks are available then blind people are basically shut out.

Silverstreak Wonder, perhaps a short perusal of the article before creating some imaginary ultra liberal people would have been in order?

9

If you read the article, you will find that the University of Arizona pre-loaded one with a lot of classic books (many of which are out of copyright).

If you read my post, you will see that I mentioned that there are now faculty working on various free online textbook projects - the main thing in their way is the printing cost.

Professors have to be careful about scanning and distributing at many schools - one student bitchy about a grade and you are busted (not to mention that it is illegal).

Course materials need to find new delivery methods. E-books (NOT just the Kindle) are one of them. Ebooks cost about as much as one semester’s worth of textbooks, and with lower prices for electronic versions of some of the texts, can pay for themselves with a year. Add in legal distributions of certain journal articles in .pdf format and you get a new, paradigm shifting distribution and usage model.

None of this is going to happen, however, when the DOJ is suing schools for experimental programs.

10

Yes - but should that lack of a current feature make it illegal for the school to use Kindles as ONE of the distribution methods? As long as the blind can get the materials in braille format, shouldn’t that be good enough? Or at LEAST good enough to continue the experiment?

11

So long as everyone has access to the same materials I think that’s totally reasonable and that was exactly my though when I first heard about this. The story I heard on the radio last night gave the impression that these classes were trying out ebook readers as the sole method of distribution and inclass use and that blind students were thus getting hosed.

12

The whole point of these exercises isn’t to stop the use of technology it’s to force manufactuers of said things to come up with an all in one solution.

The fact is when someone develops a product he/she says, “What’s the cheapest way to make this functions.” This is understandable since it maxamizes profit.

The makers of Kindle have no interest in creating a product for blind people, as there isn’t enough profit in it.

But suppose a univeristy can create a market? If a univeristy can say, “We have 10,000 students and they would use the Kindle if it served both the sighted and the blind.”

Now this gives the makers of Kindle or their competitors the push to develop a product that would serve blind people.

OK I can see you’re saying, “But why should the sighted foot the cost for the blind.”

Yet we do this all the time. Do you have health insurance at work? Why are the premiums of the guy with the heart attack and still smokes the same as the guy who works out at the gym and is in perfect health? The healthy guy is subsidizing the sickly one.

A univerisity education is a great thing for the blind. They need to be able to have a skill, 'cause they aren’t able to do a lot of unskilled labor, so they’d wind up on the dole.

All businesses, whether they’re makers of the Kindle or big pharma or whatever, need to be pushed to make socially responsible product.

So the university is creating a demand for a reader to serve BOTH blind and sighted people.

I know the next quesiton is, “Why can’t they just make two, one for sighted and one for the blind.” Makes sense but we all know how well “seperate but equal” works in real life.

It rarely does. The one without profit will be abandoned.

In this case if the univeristy said, “If the makers of Kindle will develop an reader for the blind, we’ll let them use Kindle for the sighted.”

Well the makers of Kindle would do this. Then in a few years after the Kindles are so integrated in the university system, the makers of the Kindle would simply stop supporting the blind version. By then it’d be too late for the university to toss out the Kindles for the sighted.

So it’s up to the university to demand a Kindle or reader by a competitor that serves ALL people, so it will be made and maintained.

OK you may not agree with the above logic, I don’t blame you, but my point is just to tell you the reasons behind that logic.

13

Classics of literary fiction, particularly those that are out of copyright, do not cost any appreciable amount to acquire. $10 for a new Penguin paperback, $5 for the book and shipping for something used on Amazon, $2 if you can find it at your local used bookstore, free plaintext files in multiple places.

Textbook pricing is another matter and is what you are claiming will be changed due to the Kindle in the future.

Again, anyone who controls a textbook and wishes to make money from it can make even more money if it’s only distributed via Kindle (until the inevitable time when the Kindle is cracked, anyway). “Open source” textbooks are only a solution if 1) the cost of the reading device outweighs the cost of the physical textbook in both money and convenience [meaning you will need to use more than just one of them in a college career and 2) the textbooks themselves are of an appropriate quality. The page you linked to has nothing about “professors” writing books, just fulltime free-content advocates talking in generalities and a bunch of dead links to the company’s website. When there are free textbooks available that are actually written by authorities in the field and not by the Wikipedia crowd, we’ll talk.

14

McAffee (Cal Tech Prof in Econ) wrote an open source Econ book.

Flat World Knowledge sells .pdf texts for half the price of printed volumes. A student could pay off the Ebook within a year, depending on their course load.

15

More open source textbook goodness:

http://linear.ups.edu/opentexts.html

16

But is this in the interest of American colleges, who directly benefit from book sales? Spanish colleges have been using self-assembled/published materials for generations (created and sold by the Student Union, not by the college), but Spanish colleges do not directly benefit from selling books to students, as they do not own bookstores.

17

The Barnes and Nobel Nook can display pdf files, and is not captive to B&N. As long as the pdf textbooks are readable on devices the blind users already have access to, why wouldn’t a Nook be acceptable?

18

This was a pilot program to test the devices in the classroom. Either the DOJ has overstepped it’s bounds or the Disabilities Act needs to be rewritten to include an ounce of common sense.

Not every product on the planet needs to be disabled-enabled. As long as the school provides a medium for it’s students there is no reason that other mediums can’t be used in an effort to control costs.

19

There is a lot of variability, the sort of blindness, the tech savvy of the student, and the sort of text all influence the easy of access. Each student adapts a different way and effectivness.

In general, math, statistics accounting is rather terrible. Text based stuff is easier. Science is all over.

Stats is amusing-Lets make a T-table easy for a blind person to read.

20

[Slightly off-topic rant]

I find the idea of Kindle-only books abhorrent:

  1. It means that the reader’s ability to read can be restricted. Books can be recalled or given limited usage. I can’t remember which one of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday next books contained a proposal to create books that could only be read three times. Guess what? It’s possible now!

  2. Textbooks already have a planned obsolescence factor as new editions are released. Now every book can become obsolete due to being in the wrong format. Yay!

  3. Repeat after me: “I couldn’t do my homework - my book crashed.”