Two universities running pilot programmes for the Kindle DX as a textbook reader have opted out of the divice. Reason? Accessibility issues. That is, because not all books will be available with text-to-speech capacity, there will be no guarantee that they’ll be useful to blind students.
Based on my very limited first hand experience with these things, this is a real disappointment. The alternative to electronically reading e-texts is endless, expensive and labor intensive OCRing of printed works, which generally destroys books (i.e., their binding has to be cut). This would have saves a tremendous amount of grief for visually impaired students. It’s a real shame.
More broadly and shallowly, it leaves armies of undergrads carting around overpriced textbooks that, most often, no one thinks are anything better than barely adequate to their purpose. Wait for the next round, I guess.
