Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader is a hit, no question about that. It may go down in history as the device that brought digital books out of the realms of sci-fi (remember the PADDs in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”?) and into the hands of the masses. And then there are those who hold out hope it will be the salvation of struggling newsrooms across America.
But it won’t be a smooth transition from printed word to pixel.
According to the Associated Press, the U.S. Department of Justice just reached a settlement with three American universities that must set aside the Kindle for academic purposes until Amazon produces a version that is easy for blind people to use. That came just days after an Arizona university announced a similar arrangement, prompted by a lawsuit filed by blind advocacy organizations.
Why do they oppose the Kindle’s use in the classroom? After all, it has a read-aloud function. The problem with the Kindle, according to these advocates for the blind, is that there is no way for someone without sight to navigate through the device’s menus and get to the e-books to tell the Kindle to read them out loud. What good is an audiobook to anyone if they can’t find it?
Before the lawsuits were settled, Amazon had announced that a blind-friendly version of the Kindle is on its way – and it’s due out this summer.
But Amazon’s problems don’t end there. In the fall of 2009, the online retailer had to offer free books to Kindle customers and defend its integrity after it reached right into their digital libraries and yanked back books that customers had purchased in good faith. Seems Amazon sold digital versions of George Orwell’s novels “1984″ and “Animal Farm” that weren’t authorized to be sold in the United States, though they were in the public domain elsewhere in the world.
The move caused a firestorm of indignation and comparisons to Orwell’s dystopian future as seen in “1984,” where thought police repress the masses and limit access to information and other freedoms. It even sparked a lawsuit by a high school student who said he lost notes he had made on the Kindle for a school assignment.
The Kindle is an important step in the evolution of the written word — no doubt. But it still has a long way to go, and the final page won’t be written until someone learns to accomodate every reader’s needs and freedoms.
