Tag Archives: Kindle Fire

How I turned my Kindle Fire HD from a cash register and billboard into a good machine for an e-book lover

H.L. Mencken, the American iconoclast, depicted Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Could the same idea apply to the killjoys at Amazon who so cruelly made the $199 Amazon Kindle Fire HD less of an e-book machine and more of a billboard and cash register? Granted, many readers might not [...]

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How blind-friendly are Amazon’s Kindle apps for the iPhone and iPad? And what about those for other operating systems?

Text to speech is AWOL from Amazon’s beautiful Paperwhite Kindles (photo), and LibraryCity’s complaint made a stir, complete with a link at The Verge, a major tech site. Keep your related comments coming. I especially like those from David Goldfield, a blind Philadelphian who is an accessibility expert and activist. Please sign the Reading Rights [...]

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Ten ‘musts’ for an e-library ecosystem—to fight off bullying by content-providers and respect traditional library priorities

Libraries will lose out to profit-crazed publishers and other content-providers unless they can offer something back—beyond their current audiences. Penguin‘s refusal to provide new audiobooks to libraries is just part of an ugly pattern of bullying from the commercial side. Another, of course, is HarperCollins’ requirement that libraries loan an e-book no more than 26 [...]

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Toward an e-library ecosystem: Public libraries will screw themselves if they don’t learn from Amazon’s comprehensive ‘seamless’ approach

Video by Lisa Gade of Mobile TechReview, another Fire fan. Update, Jan. 19, 2012: Here. How long would I keep my Kindle Fire tablet? I’d bought it mostly just to stay in touch with popular e-book tech. The Fire is hobbled with onerous digital rights management, favors a proprietary e-book format, and in certain ways [...]

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The nuts and bolts of using tablet computers, e-libraries, and family literacy initiatives to encourage young children to read

My sister the retired schoolteacher came to e-books only late in life, but you’d never know it from her enthusiasm for her iPad as a reading tool. Dorothy can blow up the type, for example. She actually reads faster than before, and, in fact, she hopes to use e-books to help spur her grandchildren to [...]

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How a national digital library system could help promote early childhood learning—and academic and vocational success later on

“People need people to learn, at least when they’re young.” Toddlers at a kid-low wooden table—drinking orange juice. Four decades later, as a ex-poverty beat reporter, I still remember that scene from the Head Start program for an Ohio factory town. The juice made sense, given the long-known link between nutrition, brain development, and learning [...]

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