Posted on 08/09/2010 9:47:18 AM PDT by Mobile Vulgus
It's the age of the computer, right? The day has arrived when our lives are increasingly conducted in cyberspace, online, over cell phones and web enabled devices. So, shouldn't it be a natural thing that college textbooks begin to migrate to an electronic variety instead of dithering in the old fashioned world of printed paper? You might have an enthusiastic "yes, yes, yes" in mind, but then again you wouldn't be Obama's Department of Justice because they say "no, no, no."
Byron York recently wrote a piece for the Washington Examiner that explained why the DOJ was attacking the idea of Kindle readers and e-books for college textbooks and preventing colleges and universities from offering them to students.
York reports that the DOJ ridiculously made the claim that electronic book readers like Amazon's Kindle violated the "civil rights" of the blind and so, e-books violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. Because of this the DOJ insisted that several pilot programs in colleges and universities across the country be discontinued until e-books can be "accessible" to blind people...
Read the rest at Publiusforum.com...
But my yellow highlighting pen would have ruined the screen.
Reagan was right. Cut taxes and starve this monster called government.
That is the ONLY way to get rid of this type of idiocy. And this type of idiocy is repeated thousands of times.
Uh Oh! Kindle must be endangering union bookmaking jobs somewhere...
Education monopoly defending its turf.
It's things like this -- decisions that manifestly prevent the vast majority of people from exercising basic rights and having better lives -- things like this really make me see our government as tyranny.
I wonder if walking violates the civil rights of periplegics? It should be banned until it is accessible to the crippled.
Publishing houses are a way to funnel payola to candidates though media conglomerates. Their way or no way.
So killing trees is progressive now.
Yes, and probably threatening the liberal college professors who write their own books, update a page or two every year, then require the latest version to be purchased at the camput bookstore. Then the book is referred to once or twice during the semester. It would be a hardship for those profs to have to have their works moved over to e-books.
Neah. Somebody (probably whoever owns B&N) BOUGHT this reaction from the DoJ.
They has a vision of Amazon sending zillions of Kindles out to schools everywhere and the mobi/azf file format becoming the default eBook format.
camput = campus
but then you had figured that out
And we have a winner !!!
There are internal functions for notes, high-lighting, bookmarks, etc.
Morons, indeed. Evidently, no one in the DOJ is familiar with the Kindle’s “text to speech” functionality. Granted, it’s not an optimal technology yet, as the voice is totally without expression, but it seems that this technology is much further advanced from the “text to speech” tech currently employed in printed textbooks. (Oh wait; there’s no such thing in printed texts.)
Didn’t I say on another Kindle thread that the Marxists would try to control the spread of knowledge?
Too soon?
It's the kickbacks, baby!
So do cars (blind people can’t drive), airplanes (blind people can’t fly), televisions, traditional printed textbooks, works of art, and cameras...
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