Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

About bloody time. I hope Barnes & Noble follows suite. I prefer, for a variety of reasons, B&N ebooks and their Nook over Amazon's format and the Kindles. My problem is that I have an old Nook tablet, theoretically I can root it and it will run a version of Android, but I don't know if it'll be a late enough version to access Google's Play store and the Kindle app. B&N is going to be announcing two new Nooks soon, so I may need to buy a new tablet in the not distant future.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/383932/amazon-kindle-matchbook-bundles-ebooks-with-print-purchases

On one hand, it's cool that it can be (for now) rooted by playing an MP3. On the other, this could be a major infection vector. I would expect Amazon to patch this, but it's still interesting.

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/12/10/1915234/kindle-touch-gets-worlds-simplest-jailbreak

"Three US universities will stop promoting the use of Amazon.com's Kindle DX e-book reader in classrooms after complaints that the device doesn't give blind students equal access to information. Settlements with Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Pace University in New York City and Reed College in Portland, Oregon, were announced Wednesday by the US Department of Justice. The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind had complained that use of the Kindle devices discriminates against students with vision problems."

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/13/2159231/US-DOJ-Says-Kindle-In-Classroom-Hurts-Blind-Students?art_pos=15

I think the Kindle is a heck of a product even though I don't own one. I did get to play with one and was fairly impressed, what doesn't impress me is the DRM lockdown and the price of books. I didn't like the idea of a Kindle being your 'only' college text book as I didn't think the implementation had evolved enough. When some universities started integrating Kindles, one student's comment summed it up for me perfectly. The student said that when I'm working on a paper, I've got four or five books open at the same time, flipping back and forth between them. You just can't do that with a Kindle. You can do it with a laptop with ebooks, but even then it's better to have the physical book.

But the interesting thing is that the Kindle has text-to-speech built-in. But apparently their navigation functions aren't usable by blind people, I guess that's where the problem started.

I worked at NMSU and have attended a lot of different colleges, including working in computer labs. They've always had Braille printers, and those things are noisy as hell. They weren't used all the time, but they were still frequently used.