EduKindle

The *New* Democratic Leadership Council recently published a white paper by Thomas Z. Freedman that details the rationale and the economics of deploying Kindle ereaders to schoolchildren across America. In a thoughtful approach to envisioning the cost, the method, and the timeframe for getting a Kindle into every backpack, Freedman says

We shouldn’t wait a decade or two to begin to achieve what is inevitable — an education system where each American schoolchild has an eTextbook, like Amazon’s Kindle, loaded with the most up-to-date and interactive teaching materials and texts available. The ‘Kindle in every backpack’ concept isn’t just an educational gimmick—it could improve education quality and save money.

If you are curious about this proposal, and want to read it (yes!) on your Kindle, you can follow this link to download the report from the DLC site. EduKindle proudly provides the Kindle-formatted report to the DLC and its readers.

When I saw the news about the lawsuit filed at Arizona State University concerning Kindle accessibility issues, I think I had a quick negative reaction to the upshot of the suit, that providing Kindles to sighted students creates a disadvantage for blind students. A journalism major at ASU, a plaintiff in the suit, sums up the argument:

“Not having access to the advanced reading features of the Kindle DX—including the ability to download books and course materials, add my own bookmarks and notes, and look up supplemental information instantly on the Internet when I encounter it in my reading—will lock me out of this new technology and put me and other blind students at a competitive disadvantage relative to our sighted peers.“

My reaction was, wait a minute, how can we expect every new innovation leap fully formed from the mind of its inventor and accommodate the needs of every user on its first outing? I can think of a lot of gadgets brought to market in the last decade that were not readily usable by everyone in the population. In fact, the new Kindle sports a helpful feature, onboard text-to-speech functionality, that seems to be right up the alley of those who have trouble reading the print for themselves. Making an ereader device that offers many advantages to blind as well as sighted students appears to be a step forward, rather than “unconscionable discrimination against and callous indifference to the right of blind students to receive an equal education,” as claimed by Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, one of the plaintiffs in the suit.

Then, as I thought about this a bit more, I began to be persuaded by the merits of the suit.

This same Dr. Maurer, in a more reasoned and less inflamatory section of his statement, makes a lot of sense when he says:

“Given the highly-advanced technology involved, there is no good reason that Amazon’s Kindle DX device should be inaccessible to blind students.  Amazon could have used the same text-to-speech technology that reads e-books on the device aloud to make its menus accessible to the blind, but it chose not to do so.“

You know, the guy has a point. Is it possible that Amazon didn’t see this coming? Any school administrator worth his or her salt would have noticed that the very feature of the Kindle that addresses the needs of the blind highlights the limitations of the device.

Welcome to the world of publicly funded education and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, wizards of business!

But this is the kind of thing that Amazon, with its laser focus on the consumer experience, isn’t really thinking about as it proposes the Kindle as an academic device. The company has already redesigned the keypad almost out of existence, and seems not to have considered that its commitment to pdf handling bypasses the value of its text-to-speech technology altogether, meaning that neither the sighted nor the blind will be able to have a textbook in pdf format read to them on the Kindle.

So, I am forced to side with the plaintiffs in this case. Amazon and its partners (the universities themselves) should have seen this coming. As one commenter on this situation observed,  retrofitting the bathrooms in your building to accommodate folks in wheelchairs doesn’t really cut it if you don’t build a ramp to ensure that they can get into the building.

Now that I have been using my Kindle DX for a couple of weeks, I have some observations. First, all of the menu-driven controls that I criticized a little bit in assessing the changes from kindle 1 to Kindle 2 are not as problematic as I thought. Switching the wifi on and off is pretty easy, and, as long as I make the assumption that the thing is on when the machine is asleep or off (and I can’t see the indicator), not a difficult to deal with as I thought. Also, the battery life is better, so leaving the wifi on doesn’t kill the machine as quickly as it does on my Kindle 1. All good. And I do have to say that since getting the DX, my Kindle 1 has pretty much stayed put in my bag.

As I look at the DX, I think that its fate will be one of the following:

1. The DX will be known in the long run as the Kindle, and people will ask, “Wasn’t there another, smaller version of the Kindle before this one?” (Yes, it doesn’t fit in a handbag the way the Kindle 1 and Kindle 2 fit in a handbag, but given the size of the handbags carried by my wife and daughter, the DX will fit in a lot of handbags just fine.)

OR

2. The DX will be overwhelmed by the flood of newer, bigger machines from other manufacturers in the next 18 months, and people will wonder about that funny machine that Amazon used to produce that was too big to be really convenient, too expensive to be adopted en masse, and not quite functional enough to read a magazine or newspaper on. (And isn’t that the one with no color?)

Somehow, I think it will be one or the other: the standard for ereading devices, or a footnote in the development of ereaders, an historical oddity. Whichever it is, the machine I have in my hands right now is pretty cool!